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:

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.

The vulnerability assessment for the selected crops in Senegal is based on the interaction of sensitivity to change, exposure, and adaptive capacity. We use the conceptual framework of climate-related risk from the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II (WGII) to examine the impacts that climate change is likely to have on agriculture and food security.

This paper examines how rural transformation in Uzbekistan alters gender norms and roles and, consequently, affects women’s involvement in agriculture. We focus on the role that contextual factors, particularly kinship relations, government goals, and institutional structures each contribute to rural transformation and male outmigration, and how these, in turn, increase women’s work in wheat production and processing. The wheat is the most important crop in the country which has the highest area coverage (35%) in Uzbekistan.

This report forms part of an AICCRA knowledge series on Food Systems.
This report builds upon the presentation on Climate Change and Agricultural Productivity in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Region which was delivered at the Centre for Coordination of Agricultural Research and Development for Southern Africa (CCARDESA) Agricultural Symposium held on 10 June 2021.

The MENA region is both disproportionately vulnerable to compound climate fragility risks and among the most gender unequal regions in the world.