Climate Smart Agriculture? Governing the Sustainable Development Goals in Sub-Saharan Africa

Newell, Peter; Taylor, Olivia; Næss, Lars Otto; Thompson, John; Mahmoud, Hussein Abdullahi; Ndaki, Patrick Madulu; Rurangwa, Raphael; Teshome, Abel

doi:10.3389/fsufs.2019.00055

Cited by 55 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is anticipated as a promising approach to food security with potential to implement SDG2 and SDG13 on climate simultaneously, but not without significant challenge. Newell et al's [58] study of political, economic, and governance challenges in four East African countries, using CSA to address both these SDGs, found that governments must navigate a diversity of approaches that entail 'choices and conflicts, synergies and trade-offs.' Partey et al [59] found that CSA 'seems to be a suitable strategy' in West Africa for adapting to climate variability and managing crop production risks.…”

Section: Sdg Impediments and Confluencementioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and Sustainability: Learning from Women’s Farming in Africa

Glazebrook

Opoku

2020

Sustainability

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Africa was the only continent not to achieve the 2015 Millennium Development Goal of 50% poverty reduction. This paper asks whether Africa will fare better in meeting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) addressing poverty and hunger by 2030. To answer this question, we examine a diverse body of literature and provide relevant longitudinal data collected over 13 years of field research. We find that ‘sustainable development’ is a failed concept immersed in the contemporary global economic system that favors growth over ecosystem stability and international institutions that undervalue women’s capacity for sustainability in their care-work as food providers. We examine barriers to women’s farming (climate change, gender bias, limited access to land, technology, finance) and provide examples of women’s innovative strategies for overcoming barriers in their care practices toward family and community well-being and ecosystem health. We find that Africa will likely repeat past failures without community-level interventions that empower women to achieve SDGs on poverty, hunger, gender equity, and ecosystem management. We uncover similar holistic thinking in women’s agricultural practices and scientific conception of ‘ecosystem services’.

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Section: Sdg Impediments and Confluencementioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and Sustainability: Learning from Women’s Farming in Africa

Glazebrook

Opoku

2020

Sustainability

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“…Jägermeyr et al (2016) suggested that more efficient water use can increase kcal-equivalent production by 26% globally, corresponding to increased volumetric global food production by 41%. This highlights the co-relations between soil, food, and water systems (Figure 6) and that this understanding can be applied to SDGs (Charlton, 2016;Nhemachena et al, 2018;Newell et al, 2019).…”

Section: Cascading Environmental Systemsmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…For example, food insecurity arises as a combination of lack of education, job opportunities, mobility, health, demographic factors, and other socioeconomic factors (Oni et al, 2010;Ramos-Mejía et al, 2018). Smallholder farming is therefore a life support strategy for more than just the provision of food resources, being linked explicitly to SDGs 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 15 (see https://sdgs.un.org/goals) (e.g., Dawson et al, 2019;Newell et al, 2019). The success of smallholder farmer activity in Limpopo has also been critically linked to the presence and nature of government support mechanisms, including social grants, training, and agricultural extension (Kativhu et al, 2020).…”

Section: Cascading Environmental Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental Services: A New Approach Toward Addressing Sustainable Development Goals in Sub-Saharan Africa

Knight¹

2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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The physical environment provides resources and specific types of environmental services relevant to the maintenance of human livelihoods globally and with specific reference to sub-Saharan Africa, including soils, food, and water systems. Previous studies on the shared nexus of such resources commonly view these as self-contained systems operating independent of their physical contexts provided by landscape-scale geomorphology and its related processes. This study critically examines the viewpoints adopted by such nexus studies with specific reference to sub-Saharan Africa, arguing that these studies are reductive, considering only the shared disciplinary overlap (nexus) and not their wider contexts, and are based on only a limited understanding of the workings of physical systems. This study argues that considering the attributes of the physical landscape and its provision of environmental services provides a broader and scientifically-informed context for understanding of interlinked issues such as relationships between soil–food–water systems. Framing such “nexus” studies in this wider context can derive a better understanding of the connections between different elements such as soil, food, and water, amongst others, and with respect to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. The concept of environmental services is therefore a more powerful tool to examine both the connections between physical and human environmental processes and properties in sub-Saharan Africa, and to address overarching environmental issues such as land degradation, soil erosion loss, water scarcity, and impacts of climate change.

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“…Some SDGs do have a leveraging co-benefit effect, while others present trade-offs across a series of SDGs. Policy coherence and effectiveness will be achieved if food security and agriculture options take into account their strong leveraging effect, but also addressing the trade-off that they can have when it comes to climate change and land degradation, if not adopting a CSA approach (Pham-Truffert et al 2020;Newell et al 2019…”

Section: Policies Creating An Enabling Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transitioning to Decent Work and Economic Growth

Aerni¹,

Stavridou²,

Schluep³

2021

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According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the private sector plays a key role in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). After all, sustainable and inclusive economic growth is essential to enable more people to participate in global prosperity. Encouraging entrepreneurship and job creation are key to SDG 8, as are effective measures to eradicate forced labor, slavery, and human trafficking. Since more than 90 percent of jobs are created by the private sector, more attention must be paid to entrepreneurs that help create dynamic and responsible enterprises that often generate positive externalities for society and the environment through investments in scalable innovations and a commitment to local embeddedness. As such, they help lift people out of poverty through new and relatively well-paid jobs and enable local economies to become more sustainable through global value chain integration.

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Climate Smart Agriculture? Governing the Sustainable Development Goals in Sub-Saharan Africa

Cited by 55 publications

References 39 publications

Gender and Sustainability: Learning from Women’s Farming in Africa

Gender and Sustainability: Learning from Women’s Farming in Africa

Environmental Services: A New Approach Toward Addressing Sustainable Development Goals in Sub-Saharan Africa

Transitioning to Decent Work and Economic Growth

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