Climate and environment

©IFAD/Factstory

Around the world, the lives of small-scale farmers are being upended by climate change. They need support to adapt to climate change and to protect the planet’s precious resources.

Context

Few people are as affected by climate change as small-scale farmers in developing countries. Rising sea levels, fluctuating temperatures and unpredictable rainfall make producing food an enormous challenge. More frequent and intense extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods, exacerbate their struggles.

With small-scale farmers producing a third of the world’s food, we urgently need to support them to ensure healthy, nutritious and sustainable food for all.

Despite their importance to global food security, climate finance simply does not serve small-scale farmers. Only 0.8 per cent of global climate finance goes to small-scale producers – the very people who are least able to cope with the impacts of a global crisis that is not of their making.

Opportunities

We must support small-scale producers to adapt to climate change. Depending on needs, this can mean building flood defences and early warning systems for cyclones. It could mean growing drought-resistant crops or redesigning government policies to respond to a climate change future.

While agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, it is also key to limiting further changes. For example, greenhouse gases emissions can be reduced using different livestock rearing methods, while carbon sinks, like peatlands, remove carbon from the air.

Small-scale farmers prove that it’s possible to mitigate climate change and adapt to its effects, while producing enough food for everyone.

What IFAD does

IFAD increased the climate finance target of its Programme of Loans and Grants by 15 percentage points from 2019 to 2024, reflecting its commitment to moving the dial on climate finance and supporting small-scale producers to adapt to climate change. Projects from across our portfolio empower rural communities to employ agroecological approaches, help farmers avoid climate related shocks, and break the linkages between poverty and the degradation of natural resources, while rehabilitating areas of water scarcity.

We assess the impacts of our climate investments using our Social, Environmental and Climate Assessment Procedures.

Our investments often focus on climate adaptation rather than solely mitigation, with over 90 per cent of our projects building rural people’s adaptive capacity.

We mobilize finance from multilateral climate funds to complement our loans and increase our impact. These funds include the Global Environment Facility and the Green Climate Fund.

Our flagship Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme channels climate finance to small-scale farmers. Its latest phase will benefit more than 10 million people by increasing resilience, transforming food systems, and mitigating and sequestering carbon.

Our multi-country programmes, including the Africa Rural Climate Adaptation Finance Mechanism and the Africa Integrated Climate Risk Management Programme, work across borders to support countries facing climate challenges.

We support governments to meet their Paris Agreement commitments and increase their climate ambitions related to small-scale agriculture. For example, we support developing countries to reduce agricultural emissions from methane.

We leverage partnerships, like the Global Methane Pledge and the Great Green Wall Initiative, to support small-scale farmers to adapt to climate change and mitigate emissions while building food security.

We work with farmers’ organizations to increase the understanding and use of climate-resilient agricultural practices. We also work with farmers themselves to upgrade infrastructure so that it can withstand extreme weather events. Our investments in early warning systems and disaster risk reduction measures, such as risk mapping, empower communities to cope with climate-induced hazards.

We host the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils Trust Fund which promotes nutritious, climate-resilient crops and healthy soils for global food security.

Quick links

Great Green Wall

Restoring degraded land and creating jobs for stability and prosperity in the Sahel

Learn More

Renewable energy

With clean, inexpensive renewable energy, small-scale farmers can increase agricultural production and process, store and cook their produce without harming the planet.

Learn More

IFAD at COP

See how IFAD advocates for climate finance and amplifies the voices of small-scale farmers at COP

Learn More