COP27 must scale solutions for climate and food challenges in Zambia
COP27 is a critical juncture for climate action in Africa, in particular efforts specific to the agriculture sector.
AICCRA Zambia’s number one priority is to sustainably scale solutions for Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA), supporting a climate smart agribusiness ecosystem linked to and informed by climate information services.
AICCRA fosters innovative partnerships among Zambian agribusinesses, with government agencies, universities, civil society, and farming communities to deliver climate smart technology packages and knowledge that respond to particular climate challenges.
In collaboration with Zambia’s digital hub, we broaden access to Climate Information Services (CIS) and through agriculture advisories provide short term and context specific climate projections which inform decisions about the use of technologies and markets.
To nurture the agri-business ecosystems and knowledge networks for action, AICCRA collaborates with the media.
Through agri-business partnerships with women and youth we learn from climate smart agriculture innovations how to ease their uptake and ensure that they are inclusive and good for the environment.
At COP27, AICCRA Zambia will showcase science-based climate innovations that are critical to advance the countries climate action agenda.
Packaged technical solutions are integrated with contextualized climate information services and sustainable finance, through viable commercial businesses, for empowering smallholder farmers in responding to specific challenges.
Feedback to agricultural development and climate policy creates an appetizing environment for entrepreneurs driving innovation and outreach.
Zambia’s role at COP27
Zambia is the current chair of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN), preparing priorities in the lead up to the Africa COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh. and committed to ensuring Africa and the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group work closely with and advance their interests at the COP27.
The AGN alliance advocates the interests of the continent in the global climate change negotiations, with a common and undivided voice.
The role of the alliance is to provide political guidance to the negotiations in preparation of the African common position for endorsement and adoption by Ministers during COPs.
Mr Ephraim Mwepya Shitima, Secretary of the AGN, and Director for the Department of Green Economy and Climate Change in the Ministry of Green Economy and Environment, emphasized that COP27 is crucial to Africa’s climate action agenda, highlighting adaptation as a critical point of negotiation for the continent.
Investment in adaptation and mitigation is a key goal for Africa, fastening transition towards a greener economy that is fair and inclusive, and delivery of sustainable finance to enhance the implementation.
One key priority to achieve that transition will be to access increased and more transparent funding by demonstrating climate smart agriculture innovations, their impact and scalability.
AICCRA advances existing adaptation solutions, by integrating climate smart technologies with climate information services markets and finance solutions.
Accelerator programs address market barriers to advance scaling mechanism and capacity improvement is integrated in the innovation process.
Current climate and food challenges in Zambia
Zambia is a landlocked country in Southern Africa with an area of 752,618 km2. The country is blessed with a diverse of soil types and is made up of four agro-ecological zones. Despite such vast land with diverse soils, Zambia like other southern African countries has not been spared from the ravages of increased frequency and intensity of weather events resulting in food and livelihood challenges.
Out of 182 countries, Zambia was ranked the 42nd most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, it was also ranked the 143rd least ready country to respond to climate change shocks and variability (ND-GAIN, 2022). With such high vulnerability and low readiness score, Zambia has a great need for investment and innovations to improve its climate preparedness and adaptation action.
Zambia’s agriculture, water and energy sectors have been highly affected by the climate change. Variability effects such as droughts, floods, poor soils, extreme temperatures, pest and disease outbreaks have contributed to regional food insecurity, limited access to clean drinking water and decreased hydroelectricity generation capacity (Ministry of Finance and National Planning, 2022).
For example, in 2015 and 2018 there were long dry spells (El Nino) which resulted in crop failure. In 2021-22, Zambia has experienced floods displacing hundreds of people and destroying crops in an area already experiencing food shortages. The 2021/2022 farming season began with a very serious dry spells (October – December) leading to most crops that were planted early drying up and many farmers that missed planting with the first rains delayed to plant. Within the same season, the dry spells were followed by tropical storm Ana (late January) which brought heavy rains that resulted in flash floods in some parts of the country where there were no floods, the rains were too much making crop management such as weeding and pest control difficult.
Extreme weather events can have a direct impact on agricultural productivity in terms of crops, livestock, fisheries, and forestry. They can also have an indirect impact on incomes through decreased labour demand, increased local prices, and restricted market access due to various factors like negative infrastructure impacts. Therefore, climate change not only poses a threat to current incomes but also reduces their predictability in ways that are challenging for households to take into account when making decisions.
This effect of climate change on food and agriculture in Zambia is an urgent challenge that must be addressed to provide more resilient livelihoods for millions of people. Therefore, access to climate information services and climate smart agricultural innovations, such as those being supported and implemented by AICCRA, will empower smallholder farmers in Zambia to better anticipate climate-related events, adapt, mitigate and build resilient agricultural food systems.
Also, it is important that technology is enhanced and adopted to counteract and plan for future climate-related impacts. In so doing, it is key to overcome institutional barriers, such as the unintegrated and outdated policy environment, limited agriculture financing, and lack of infrastructure, that could hinder the use and uptake of adaptation solutions to climate.
Climate action priorities for Zambia
Given the urgency to address the climate crisis, Zambia has made numerous bold investments towards a green and sustainable economy that supports climate adaptation such as policies and commitments for an inclusive green economy.
As one of the major advancements, Zambia hosts several digital adoption initiatives. Some of these include the Zambia National Data Centre, e-platforms hosted by SMART Zambia (FAO and ITU, 2022), such as the e-Extension and the Zambia Integrated Agricultural Management Information System (ZIAMIS), and others such as e-Msika, and AgriPay. Proposals are also in development for e-bikes to make access to markets efficient - especially for perishable goods (Project Consultative Workshop - Zambia, 2022).
These innovations can be leveraged on to promote growth in the small- and medium-scale farming sector, further spurred by improvements in non-traditional banks providing financial access points like mobile money.
Zambia has developed well-articulated agricultural policies and strategies towards the attainment of food security, maximizing farmers’ incomes, promoting sustainable agriculture, and enhancing private sector roles in input and output markets (2023 Budget Bulletin).
Forests play a crucial role in enhancing human well-being and in sustaining the economy of Zambia. It contributes to economic growth, employment, wealth, export revenues, a stable supply of clean water, recreation and tourism opportunities, as well as essential building materials and energy for a wide range of economic sectors (UNEP, 2015).
Zambia is also prioritizing the enhancement of human and institutional capacities for undertaking and supporting more ambitious climate change actions. This will advance agricultural production and consumption practices and nature-based solutions, as well as climate change adaptation, including integrated soil and water resources management and irrigation development, integrated pests and disease control and climate smart agriculture.
The Climate Risk Insurance and Information in Zambia (CRIIZ) project implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) have actively been in collaboration with the government, private sector and insurance companies in order to support Zambian smallholders in having access to climate risk insurance and information.
How AICCRA Zambia helps deliver climate-smart agriculture
The challenge presented in Zambia is urgent and complex. It will take innovative and collaborative efforts to achieve the goals Zambia has set and the AICCRA project is well-positioned to support these efforts.
AICCRA Zambia has partnered with various government institutions, private sector agribusiness and media companies, to build resilient agri-food systems and agro-ecologies driven by science and innovation.
Accelerator business partnerships
AICCRA Zambia partners with the private sector to co-design and implement accelerator grants for small to medium enterprises to de-risk scaling CIS and CSA innovations.
These innovation bundles include sustainable financing for off-grid solar irrigation; integrated aquaculture agriculture systems; addressing drought through climate smart seed varieties; and diversified integrated mixed chicken/goats-legume systems, as well as companies that promote gender and inclusiveness.
Multi-Stakeholder Dialogues
AICCRA Zambia engages multi-stakeholder platforms and dialogues (MSDs) to encourage collective thinking and enable collaboration and action across multiple sectors.
This generates innovative ideas and solutions to advance CSA-CIS innovation and accelerate the scaling of the selected CSA bundles.
Leveraging the existing multi-stakeholder platforms and processes, AICCRA-Zambia has facilitated 3 physical MSDs at national and provincial levels, and 1 virtual meeting for women and youth entrepreneurs to share and deliberate on current CIS-CSA scaling initiatives, financial and market access challenges and opportunities.
Internship and Innovation Grant
AICCRA-Zambia implements the Internship and Innovation Grant (I2G) program to enable individuals and institutions develop the skills and capabilities needed to support translational research into business and commercialization.
AICCRA Zambia partners with the private sector and national universities to develop new and innovative solutions to smallholder farmers’ climate change challenges through applied learning and research experiences.
The program focuses on exploring and creating solutions, including but not limited to novel agribusiness models and processing equipment; digital strategies, non-technological solutions for behavioural interventions strategies for raising awareness of CSA-CIS innovations.
Specifically, the I2G program aims to support young entrepreneurs and young professionals through the private sector working experience and demand-driven innovation development.
Ag-Data Hub
To further mitigate productivity risks associated with climate changes and variability and improved access to reliable climate and weather information services, AICCRA is currently working with a number of government institutions to support and facilitate the development of Digital Agri-Data Hub.
The platform is a digital space for the integration of climate and weather data into agriculture decision making at various scales.
The Ag-Data Hub publishes data on digital solutions for agriculture that supports smallholder farmer decision making and helps transform the agriculture sector to become more climate resilient.
Development practitioners, policymakers and private actors will use the information to make investment or policy decisions and to identify partners for collaboration and co-development.
In the endeavour to provide reliable and impactful CIS, AICCRA Zambia has trained more than more than 50 people from government ministries, public universities, development and research partners on predicting droughts and floods in Zambia using Google Earth Engine.
Communication Channels
Multi-media partnerships are being solicited for driving the momentum within and across these initiatives as they provide platforms for national programs to become visible and for the business ecosystem and stakeholder networks to engage with rural communities.
Working with media helps climate smart business innovation to reach farmers, in formats and providing contextualized messages that are useful for them:
- Agricomm – profiling accelerator partners and other innovations initiatives increase outreach across the agri-business ecosystem and with policy decision processes.
- Shamba Shape Up – TV farmer life-episodes showcasing the accelerator partners and the climate smart products they offer, expanding their business outreach, networks and services.
- National Agricultural Information Services – translating the accelerator contents to radio programs, in order to reach the majority of smallholder farmers.
Farmers can access climate relevant information to be able to understand and use those innovations.
Media programs co-designed with private sector hence provide an important bridge for research, development and business to achieve their targets of scaling climate smart agriculture.
There is an urgent climate crisis in Zambia and AICCRA is doing a lot of work to help address that. Zambia and Africa have an opportunity to push an agenda that will benefit the continent in combating climate change effect and AICCRA is playing an important role in this work.
As we count down to COP27 we are looking forward to seeing Zambia and Africa demand that developed countries fulfil pledges made in the Paris Agreement which seeks to scale up efforts and support actions to reduce emissions, building resilience and reducing vulnerability to the adverse effects of climate change and upholding and promoting regional and international corporations.
Read other farmer profiles and updates from AICCRA’s work in its six focus countries at our COP27 hub.