Alessandro De Pinto

Beyond climate-smart agriculture: toward safe operating spaces for global food systems

Agriculture is considered to be “climate-smart” when it contributes to increasing food security, adaptation and mitigation in a sustainable way. This new concept now dominates current discussions in agricultural development because of its capacity to unite the agendas of the agriculture, development and climate change communities under one brand. In this opinion piece authored by scientists from a variety of international agricultural and climate research communities, we argue that the concept needs to be evaluated critically because the relationship between the three dimensions is poorly understood, such that practically any improved agricultural practice can be considered climate-smart. This lack of clarity may have contributed to the broad appeal of the concept. From the understanding that we must hold ourselves accountable to demonstrably better meet human needs in the short and long term within foreseeable local and planetary limits, we develop a conceptualization of climate-smart agriculture as agriculture that can be shown to bring us closer to safe operating spaces for agricultural and food systems across spatial and temporal scales. Improvements in the management of agricultural systems that bring us significantly closer to safe operating spaces will require transformations in governance and use of our natural resources, underpinned by enabling political, social and economic conditions beyond incremental changes. Establishing scientifically credible indicators and metrics of long-term safe operating spaces in the context of a changing climate and growing social-ecological challenges is critical to creating the societal demand and political will required to motivate deep transformations. Answering questions on how the needed transformational change can be achieved will require actively setting and testing hypotheses to refine and characterize our concepts of safer spaces for social-ecological systems across scales. This effort will demand prioritizing key areas of innovation, such as (1) improved adaptive management and governance of social-ecological systems; (2) development of meaningful and relevant integrated indicators of social-ecological systems; (3) gathering of quality integrated data, information, knowledge and analytical tools for improved models and scenarios in time frames and at scales relevant for decision-making; and (4) establishment of legitimate and empowered science policy dialogues on local to international scales to facilitate decision making informed by metrics and indicators of safe operating spaces.

Should REDD+ fund ‘sustainable intensification’ as a means of reducing tropical deforestation?

Over the last 50 years, the global population has doubled. Despite this, food production has more than kept pace, resulting in a 24% increase in per capita world food production and a 40% reduction...

Informing climate policy through institutional collaboration: reflections on the preparation of Colombia’s nationally determined contribution

ABSTRACT The 2015 Paris Agreement was adopted at the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In the run-up to COP 21, most UNFCCC Parties put forward intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs), containing mitigation pledges. These INDCs are now being confirmed as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), as governments formally ratify the Paris Agreement. NDCs are supposed to provide transparent, quantifiable, comparable, and verifiable mitigation objectives. However, there is neither methodological nor data consistency in the way Parties have prepared their NDCs. This article showcases recent collaboration among research, government, and private institutions that contributed to the Colombian NDC. While documenting the novel research, data, and rich web of collaboration that helped the Colombian government prepare the country’s NDC, this article links this specific case with the challenges of policy-oriented and interactive models of research. Our experience confirms previous research on the importance of stakeholder interaction, transparency and openness of processes, and willingness to break disciplinary and institutional barriers. In addition, the experience points to the importance of having appropriate available resources and a local institution acting as champion for the project. POLICY RELEVANCE The lack of methodological and data consistency in the way parties have prepared their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) can significantly slow down the progress toward limiting global warming below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. In the meantime, calls for scientists to provide ‘usable’ information are increasing and the importance of close collaboration between scientists, end-users, and stakeholders is also increasingly acknowledged. In this article we make explicit the process and research challenges faced during what was, in the authors’ opinion, the successful collaboration among scientists, governmental, and private institutions that led to the formulation of an essential component of the Colombian NDC. As policy makers move forward with the implementation of their plans and as scientists become increasingly engaged with government planning, it is essential that they are aware of the needs and demands in terms of collaborations, data, resources, and type of results necessary to produce analyses that can be made fully public and can withstand international scrutiny.