Knowledge Agora



Scientific Article details

Title 'Clearing the air': common drivers of climate-smart smallholder food production in Eastern and Southern Africa
ID_Doc 76365
Authors Branca, G; Perelli, C
Title 'Clearing the air': common drivers of climate-smart smallholder food production in Eastern and Southern Africa
Year 2020
Published
DOI 10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.121900
Abstract African smallholders should adopt climate-smart agriculture to make a sustainable transition towards cleaner, circular and more productive food systems. Farmers must play a key role in that process. However, the adoption and diffusion of climate-smart technologies have been slow. Here, a cross-sectional econometric analysis using primary data on sustainable farming practices in the cereal-legume farming systems of Ethiopia, Malawi, South Africa and Tanzania is applied to analyse the drivers and intensity of innovation adoption. Socio-economic barriers reduce adoption intensity among marginalised farmers, and proper incentives are needed to overcome them. Business links between technology-ready smallholders and small-to-medium enterprises must be created to enable the uptake and scaling-up of innovations and the development of industrial application models. Such results can support the design of evidence-based strategies for the sustainable transformation of production systems. While national climate policies already include climate-smart agriculture as an adaptation blueprint, policy makers need empirical evidence to support large-scale adoption. This research is an innovative contribution to that effort. It uses a unique household dataset where data is scarce; it considers the impact of smallholders' conditioning factors on technology climate-smartness level; and it estimates the correlations among a wide range of practices, agro-ecologies and geographical contexts. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Author Keywords
Index Keywords Index Keywords
Document Type Other
Open Access Open Access
Source Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED); Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)
EID WOS:000579071300010
WoS Category Green & Sustainable Science & Technology; Engineering, Environmental; Environmental Sciences
Research Area Science & Technology - Other Topics; Engineering; Environmental Sciences & Ecology
PDF https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.121900
Similar atricles
Scroll