Projects

Highly adaptive and resilient villages in Southeast Asia

Current
Photo: G. Smith (CIAT)

Project description

The farming livelihood in Southeast Asia is vulnerable to extreme weather events, seasonal shifts, and climate change risks. Because of this, CCAFS aims to provide integrated climate-smart agriculture technologies and practices (CSA T&Ps) that will enhance the adaptive capacity of farmers, including women and marginalised groups, in the Climate-Smart Villages (CSVs) in Vietnam (Ma North, My Loi Central, Tra Hat South), Lao PDR (Ban Pailom and Ban Ekxang), and Cambodia (Rohal Soung).

These technologies should:

  1. enable stakeholders to identify and meet priorities of farmers;
  2. enable farmers to have better knowledge of, and adopt, locally adaptive CSA technologies and practices, and to integrate these into their agricultural systems;
  3. activate farmer-to-farmer diffusion scheme for rolling out the CSA work to neighboring villages and districts, contributing to the local extension work; and
  4. spread this knowledge among farming communities, governments, research organizations, NGOs, in order to help scale out/up adoption of CSA practices.

The use of these technologies consequently improves the resilience of farmers’ livelihoods in the changing climate, for example, stable and continued productivity growths, improved soil health, suitable stress-tolerant varieties and breeds, smarter waste management, better eco-efficiencies among farming practices, and effective knowledge diffusion among farmers.

The project aims to target other users beyond these CSVs in order to expand the CSA concept and adoption of locally adapted technologies and practices. These users include community-based institutions; external stakeholders, including regional research institutes and value-chain actors; national/subnational policy-makers and regulatory agencies that formulate climate change adaptation plans, and provinces and countries in Southeast Asia.

Project activities include:

  • Assessment and priority setting – identify biophysical and socio-economic constraints, review/consolidate results from prior CSV assessments, conduct systematic field survey and spatially explicitly assess crop suitability, and CSA multi-stakeholder planning.
  • Participatory action research – Conduct participatory farmer-group testing of technologies and practices within CCAFS’ broader CSV social learning process, farmers’ training/capacity building, and learning-oriented monitoring and evaluation, and create farmer-to-farmer knowledge diffusion scheme.
  • Knowledge sharing and networking – incorporate location-specific technologies and practices in innovation strategies of parallel projects in CCAFS Southeast Asia through: joint impact pathways planning, developing knowledge products as input to the latter’s upscaling activities, and co-organising events for policy engagement and public awareness.

Outcomes

Local stakeholders are able to identify and meet priorities of farmers, including women/marginalised groups. They access knowledge, technologies and tools for better awareness of, and enhanced capacity for, CSA adoption. CSA technologies and practices become integrated in the farmers’ overall management strategies for their agricultural systems, and consequently improve the resilience of farmers’ livelihoods.

Besides farmer end-users in CSVs who directly take up locally adopted technologies/practices, target next-users are:

  1. community-based institutions, such as local government units and development NGOs in setting up CSA incentive mechanisms;
  2. external stakeholders, including regional research institutes in prioritising CSA- relevant agenda and value chain actor in stimulating market demand for CSA-generated farm products,
  3. national/subnational policy-making and regulatory agencies in formulating climate change adaptation plans, and
  4. other provinces and countries in Southeast Asia in distilling project lessons to establish similar CSA initiatives.

Ultimately, this project should enable local public and private stakeholders to engage with identifying and meeting farmer priorities, including women and marginalised groups, and using CSA knowledge, technologies, and tools to increase their awareness and capacity to advise on evidence- and knowledge-based climate smart technologies. 

Outputs

  • Research protocols for CSA assessment and priority setting, and CSV-level M&E
  • CSV-specific trainings and capacity building activities
  • Farmer communication teams for the farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing mechanism
  • Location-specific integrated technologies and practices with potential for adaptation and up/outscaling beyond CSVs
  • Published case studies and knowledge products for sharing project results beyond the CSVs

Gender

In Ma village, 65% of farmer participants are women, who are directly implementing project activities and also leading the CSA groups. In Van Yen, the lead collaborator is an experienced female farmer and there is expected to be over 50% of women benefitting and participating in technical exchange activities in 2017. In the Philippines, a gender lens has been introduced in field-level exercises for climate-risk vulnerability assessment (CRVA) and climate-resilient agrifisheries (CRA) decision support.

Partners

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) leads this project. Partners from from Bioversity International and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) shall co-design and facilitate training-workshops for CSA assessment-priority setting and M&E and the International Potato Center (CIP) will assist in action research for testing CSA technologies and practices in target CSVs.

The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and WorldFish shall be the lead centres in assigned CSVs and shall implement activities therein correspondingly.

The Northern Mountainous Agriculture and Forestry Science Institute (NOMAFSI) is a local research institute which leads certain technical aspects of the project, including testing some CSA T&Ps and being part of the participatory action research activities of the project.

Yen Bai’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD) and Agricultural Extension Center (AEC) are two professional units of the Yen Bai provincial government which cooperate with the project team in making CSA initiatives and CSA training and outscaling plans based on results of and recommendations from the project.

Further information

For further information, please contact Project Leader, Dindo Campilan (CIAT) at d.campilan@cgiar.org.