A huge increase in investment for innovation in sustainable agri-food systems (SAS) will be critical for meeting the objectives of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement. Currently only a small fraction of investment addresses environmental or social goals together with productivity increase. A major challenge for both innovators and innovation investors is determining whether an investment ‘counts’ as one likely to promote both environmental and/or social sustainability.

KEY MESSAGES
◼ Socially inclusive digital tools are necessary to support diverse smallholder farmers’ access to digital services such as technical advice and access to markets. Improving smallholders’ access to digital resources and providing tool functions and features that enhance social inclusion are both necessary.
◼ Tool features that enable two-way communication, multiple channels of communication, co-creation of practices, and farmers’ demonstration plots support more inclusive technical advisory services.

This factsheet gives answers on how climate exacerbates root causes of conflict in Mali, using an impact pathway analysis. Two main impact pathways are identified:

This scoping study report provides critical input to AMD-Focus Area 3 for a digital landscape and users’ needs assessment to be conducted in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar by prioritizing the key production systems and value chains where AMD-WP3 will continue or build its work in the next three years. The scoping study team, led by the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR) implemented a systematic desk review and initial screening and prioritization followed by a validation process in each country to finalize the priority production systems.

The security implications of climate variability and change, commonly referred to as the climate-security nexus, have been widely discussed in both policy circles and academia. While climate is rarely the sole cause of conflict, it can exacerbate conflict risks and outcomes by affecting societies’ economic performance, amplifying patterns of marginalization and exclusion, and challenging the capacity of already strained institutions (von Uexkull & Buhaug, 2021).

The recent discourse on food sovereignty places much emphasis on democracy in determining localized food systems, and whether the food is culturally appropriate while leaning heavily on sustainable agricultural practices such as organic agriculture, ecological intensification, agroecology, naturebased

Modern food systems push agriculture to focus on a small number of commercial crops, while there is a very large diversity of untapped edible plants that could be used to address food security and nutrition. Poor and monotonous diets are closely linked to the complex burden of multiple forms of malnutrition and dietary risk. In some contexts, such as West Africa, micronutrient deficiency risks are particularly pronounced. Hence, there is an urgent need to provide people with healthy diets supported by sustainable food systems.

Climate change has many facets, including changes in long-term trends in temperature and rainfall regimes, increased year-to-year variability, and frequency of extreme events. Agriculture is the most affected, particularly in Sahelian countries, due to a scarcity of productive resources. Transitioning towards more resilient food systems requires the adoption of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) interventions.