Achieving climate smart agriculture depends on understanding the links between farming and livelihood practices, other possible adaptation options, and the effects on farm performance, which is conceptualised by farmers as wider than yields. Reliable indicators of farm performance are needed in order to model these links, and to therefore be able to design interventions which meet the differing needs of specific user groups. However, the lack of standardization of performance indicators has led to a wide array of tools and ad-hoc indicators which limit our ability to compare across studies and to draw general conclusions on relationships and trade-offs whereby performance indicators are shaped by farm management and the wider socialenvironmental context. RHoMIS is a household survey tool designed to rapidly characterise a series of standardised indicators across the spectrum of agricultural production and market integration, nutrition, food security, poverty and GHG emissions. The survey tool takes 40-60 minutes to administer per household using a digital implementation platform. This is linked to a set of automated analysis procedures that enable immediate cross-site benchmarking and intra-site characterisation. We trialled the survey in two contrasting agro-ecosystems, in Lushoto district of Tanzania (n=151) and in the Trifinio border region of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras (n=285). The tool rapidly characterised variability between farming systems at landscape scales in both locations identifying key differences across the population of farm households that would be critical for targeting CSA interventions. Our results suggest that at both sites the climate smartness of different farm strategies is clearly determined by an interaction between the characteristics of the farm household and the farm strategy. In general strategies that enabled production intensification contributed more towards the goals of climate smart agriculture on smaller farms, whereas increased market orientation was more successful on larger farms. On small farms off-farm income needs to be in place before interventions can be promoted successfully, whereas on the larger farms a choice is made between investing labour in off-farm incomes, or investing that the labour into the farm, resulting in a negative association between off-farm labour and intensification, market orientation and crop diversity on the larger farms, which is in complete opposition to the associations found for the smaller farms. The balance of indicators selected gave an adequate snap shot picture of the two sites, and allowed us to appraise the 'CSA-ness' of different existing farm strategies, within the context of other major development objectives.
Fraval et al.Food Access Deficiencies in Sub-saharan Africa nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific interventions. Interventions need to be tailored to agro-ecological zone, household composition, scale of operation and production mix. Increasing income will not necessarily result in improved diet diversity or healthy dietary choices. Interventions focused on income generation should monitor and promote crop and livestock production diversity and provide nutrition education.
The importance of land use in affecting a range of ecosystem services (ES) provided from rural landscapes is increasingly recognised, creating an imperative for tools to assist in managing impacts of land use on ES provision. Many stakeholders, at a range of scales, are involved, including policy makers and implementers, land users and people receiving the services. Here, we develop a new and comprehensive typology of ES maps by expanding the basic stockflow-receptor concept to create a set of map categories that embraces requirements for management of ES provision. We then use this typology as a framework for assessment of approaches to mapping ES. Most approaches have considered natural capital stocks of few services, at large scales ([1,000 km 2) and coarse resolution ([100 m 2). Emphasis has been on areas of ES generation, with little attention to flows, limiting the extent to which reception of services, interactions amongst services, and impacts on different stakeholders are considered. Most approaches focused on a bounded watershed or administrative unit, with little attention to landscape evolution, or to the definition of system boundaries that encompass flows from source to reception for different services. Although uncertainty is inherent in both input data and the services that are mapped, this is rarely acknowledged, quantified or presented. These features of current mapping approaches constrain their usefulness for informing the management of ES provision from rural landscapes. Key areas for future development are (1) maps at scales and resolutions that connect field scale management options to local landscape impacts; (2) mapping flows, and defining landscape boundaries, that include complete pathways, from source to reception; (3) calculating and presenting information on synergies and trade-offs amongst services; and (4) incorporating stakeholder knowledge and perspectives in the generation and interpretation of maps to bound and communicate uncertainty and improve their legitimacy.
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