Agriculture, Landscapes and Livelihoods Day – Ideas Marketplace

One of the changes to Agriculture, Landscapes, and Livelihoods day was to hold an ideas marketplace. Nine different organisations brought great ideas on how to tackle the challenges of climate change in agriculture. Numerous methods exist to address the dual goals of adaptation and mitigation. For example, the winning idea was presented by the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan. They are using bamboo charcoal as a renewable source of energy that is more sustainable than wood charcoal and firewood. It has a big impact on improving human health and better livelihoods for farmers, as well as reducing deforestation. You can see the presentation on this project as well as the nine others done in a rapid fire approach, with just five minutes each to present their ideas on agriculture and climate change at http://www.agricultureday.org/ideas-marketplace.

A key challenge is to scale-up these types of solutions. Public-private-people partnerships should be the new paradigm to increase the uptake of solutions among the agriculture community. One other example that struck a chord with me was the work of SACAU to use farmer-led approaches to agricultural training.