Presentation at the 5th Global Science Conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture. Title: Speedtalk - Empowering famers and consumer organizations to champion transformative adaptation to climate change Speaker: Rebecca Carter

1. Empowering famers and consumer
organizations to champion
transformative adaptation to climate
change
Rebecca Carter
Deputy Director, Climate Resilience Practice
World Resources Institute

2. • Incremental adaptation: “Actions where the central aim is to
maintain the essence and integrity of the existing technological,
institutional, governance, and value systems, such as through
adjustments to cropping systems via new varieties, changing
planting times, or using more efficient irrigation.”
• “In contrast, transformational adaptation seeks to change the
fundamental attributes of systems in response to actual or
expected climate and its effects, often at a scale and ambition
greater than incremental activities. It includes changes in
activities, such as changing livelihoods from cropping to livestock
or by migrating to take up a livelihood elsewhere, and also
changes in our perceptions and paradigms about the nature of
climate change, adaptation, and their relationship to other
natural and human systems.”
- IPCC AR5
Transformative Adaptation – Not Just
Bigger, Better Adaptation

4. Farmer organizations are key to
transformative adaptation
• Important source of technical support, access to
finance, inputs, and markets for farmers seeking
change.
• Can support systemic change through aggregation,
processing, value addition and marketing.
• Can assess and develop new market linkages, invest in
new processing equipment, and turn a new crop or
practice into improved, climate resilient income for
members.
• Examples:
• Costa Rica shift from coffee to oranges
• Honduras coffee to cacao
• Ethiopia FEED example