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Since Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) emerged as an approach to address the coupled challenges of climate change and food security in agriculture in 2009, many questions have surfaced that obstruct efficient and effective investment and implementation such as:

• What are the most significant current and near future climate risks undermining smallholder livelihoods?
• How can climate-smart varieties be delivered quickly and cost-effectively to smallholders?
• How can climate risks to value chains be minimized?
• What are the most promising CSA technologies and what lessons can be gleaned to help reach scale?
• What are the most effective scaling-up mechanisms for generating widespread adoption of CSA?

One tactic to answer these questions would be to set out ambitious new research agenda for CSA. However, there was the hypothesis that there was already a lot of unpublished data and evidence available from practitioners and researchers on exactly such topics. The challenge was moving that information out into the public domain.

The opensource  book, The Climate-Smart Agriculture Papers: Investigating the business of a productive, resilient and low emission future supports the documentation and sharing of lessons from unpublished or on-going research and development interventions related to the scaling up of CSA. The CSA Papers provides a platform in the form of editorial support, publication cost to uncover and broadcast these novel findings, with the intention of influencing key development projects, plans and policies.

The CSA Papers was funded by UK Aid through the Vuna Program and implemented by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) under its Partnerships for Scaling Climate-Smart Agriculture (P4S) Project. For more information contact Todd Rosenstock (t.rosenstock@cgiar.org) and Andreea Nowak (andreea.c.nowak@gmail.com).

Photo credit: C Schubert.