To impact food security, investors must understand farmers’ resilience to climate change

The world’s 600 million smallholder farmers produce a third of the global food supply. However, rising temperatures, water scarcity, and frequent extreme weather events have jeopardized these farmers’ ability to produce food. In Africa, yields of staple crops such as wheat and maize are projected to decline by 10-20 percent by 2050. Smallholders are among the most vulnerable to unexpected weather events, because they rely primarily on rainfed agriculture, and have small landholdings, as well as low education and high poverty levels. For these farmers, one season of crop failure can be dire, impacting their ability to produce food—and feed their own families—for generations to come.

BOOST RESILIENCE, NOT JUST PRODUCTIVITY

Technologies and solutions exist to increase productivity on small farms. Social enterprises, NGOs, governments, and research institutes have been developing and scaling these for decades. Generally, some combination of training, finance, and market access can help a smallholder to adopt these solutions. 60 Decibels has worked with many of these innovative social enterprises to measure their impact on a range of key metrics, including production and income. This is done by listening directly to the smallholder farmers 60 Decibels serves. The result is that impact measurement is made simple and scalable, enabling agribusinesses to improve their products andservices. In the past three years, 60 Decibels has listened to 18,000 farmers in the Global South, using standardized questions to establish impact performance benchmarks. These benchmarks include metrics for improved production and farm income—which have been paramount for most agriculture initiatives.

But with increasing climate risks, companies working with smallholders are no longer solely focused on boosting food production. They are thinking about a complex series of scenarios a farmer faces and how to ensure food production—and a sustainable income—in both the short and long terms. Consider the example of businesses that provide loans to farmers to buy quality maize seeds. Farmers get a loan and plant their farms with maize seeds. Their production increases, they earn more money, pay back their loans, and can feed their families. This entails a positive social impact and contribution to food security. Now imagine that there was insufficient rain for the maize to germinate. They may have no other crops to rely on for their income and could default on their loans. They may rely on coping strategies—like selling productive assets or keeping their kids out of school—which could negatively impact their ability to grow food and earn a living in the long term.

Businesses are now considering various climate scenarios and helping farmers to build resilience to shocks. The aforegoing fictional lending businesses, for example, might package their loans with a crop insurance product, or link their borrowers to a weather advisory service that tells them the best time to plant.

TO IMPACT RESILIENCE, MEASURE RESILIENCE

Social enterprises (and their investors) know that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” so to build farmer resilience to climate change - and therefore, food security - measuring resilience is critical. But how do you measure impacts across a range of scenarios that did and did not happen? It is extremely complex to consider all the possible scenarios for farmers in the above example. Social enterprises would need to know everything about their clients’ farms and families, the probability of specific weather events occurring, and which coping strategies they would use – and scenarios would need to be projected over the medium and long terms.

But the good news is, businesses do not have to get bogged down in complex risk modeling. To measure impact, they just have to listen to farmers, because farmers already know. They know if something has made them more or less vulnerable to a climate shock.

Let us go back to the example given. Imagine these farmers got their loans, and we asked them a simple question: “What would have happened if it did not rain enough?” Perhaps they knew that the seeds they had used the loan for were drought tolerant, and when they bought these seeds, they received an advisory on the best time to plant them. So, they felt prepared, and they could tell us that.

So now, in addition to measuring impact on the things most observable to a farmer – like production and income – 60 Decibels has simple, standard metrics for measuring a company’s impact on climate resilience. The Climate Resilience Assessment measures changes in three key dimensions of household resilience, all captured through lean, remote interviews with a representative sample of stakeholders:

1. Perceived resilience. Four key indicators are used to assess how an individual’s resilience to potential future shocks has changed because of a specific business.
2. Realized resilience. For those households who have experienced a shock recently, five more indicators are captured to measure how they fared in the face of that shock, and what the impact of the company was on their recovery.
3. Resources and enablers. Changes are measured in a farmer’s access to key resources and enablers that are proven to be drivers of resilience, providing objective measures of what factors have changed and actionable insights into how to better support households.

Through standardization, 60 Decibels is building benchmarks to enable comparability of resilience impact performance across various factors. The perceived and realized resilience indicators could, for example, be used to measure (and compare) impacts on chicken farmers in Ethiopia, coffee farmers in Indonesia, or shop- keepers in Nicaragua. Resources and enablers are designed to be used in tailored combinations while remaining standardized. The goal of this tool is to make it easy for companies to meas- ure—and therefore impact—farmers’ resilience and global food security.