Summary

The role of smallholder foresters and farmers in enabling climate resilience

Anna Triponel

April 29, 2022
Our key takeaway: The world’s remaining forest landscapes are inhabited by 500 million indigenous people, and 800 million other forest-dependent people. These people form groups (called forest and farm producer organisations) that pursue prosperity around these forests and farmlands. Climate resilience is a matter of survival for these groups, and at the same time, these groups play a critical role in enabling climate resilience. Companies can play a critical role in enabling climate resilience, by supporting these smallholder foresters and farmers in diversifying social networks, ecological systems, economic systems, and physical or technological infrastructure. In short, climate resilience is the name of the game, and forest and farm producer organisations are its key players.

The InternationalInstitute for Environment and Development, in partnership with the Forest andFarm Facility (FFF), published “Diversification for climate resilience. Thirty options for forest and farm producer organisations” (October2021) by author Duncan Macqueen. The report is directed at forest and farm producer organisations (FFPOs) and their technical and financial partners and it explains what climate resilience is, why it matters for FFPOs, and how they can achieve it. The report aims to “build confidence in an approach and options for how FFPOs strengthen climate resilience to the benefit of local forest and farm producers.”

·      Forest and farm producer organisations (FFPO) and climate resilience are inextricably linked: Climate resilience is “the ability to anticipate, prepare for, resist, recover and reorganise in the face of hazardous events, trends or disturbances related to climate change.” This matters especially for forest and farm producer organisations because their risks of being severely impacted by climate-related events are especially high (like extreme temperatures, variable rainfall patterns, droughts, fires, storms, flooding, pest and disease outbreaks, landslides, rockfalls, avalanches and sea-level rising). For FFPOs, climate resilience is a matter of survival. They need access to knowledge about how to cope with climate change and implement climate change resilience programs. However, FFPOs also “show extraordinary capacity to build resilience in the face of climate change” and they are often the only organizations able to build resilience in remote forest areas. “They provide vital agency (numbers, scale, relevance) in climate-resilience action” since “the world’s remaining forest landscapes are inhabited by 500 million indigenous people, and 800 million other forest-dependent people.”

·      A framework for how FFPOs can build climate resilience: Building climate resilience requires interrelated processes of: (i) defining the scope of the resilience program (from the small-holder to the region or the country); (ii) assessing climate-related risks and vulnerabilities; (iii) defining resilience responses; and (iv) monitoring progress to determine if the FFPO has become more resilient. FFPOs benefit from “nested tiers of organisations from local first-tier producer groups linked through district or provincial second-tier associations to regional or national third-tier unions or federations.” These structures “improve the downward spread of useful risk assessment information (eg on weather) and finance to help develop approaches for risk self-assessment that include, but also go beyond, climate risks to other critical areas of risk.” They also facilitate the spread of useful information on resilience responses and the upward spread of local solutions. 

·      Climate resilience solutions and role for companies: The report highlights 30 climate resilience solutions for forest and farm producers since “no two contexts are alike and the best options for climate resilience will inevitably vary from place to place”. Proposed actions relate to diversifying social networks, ecological systems,  economic systems, and physical or technological infrastructure. By implementing these strategies, “FFPOs represent unique organisational pathways to scale up these efforts to build resilience, reduce poverty, conserve biodiversity, restore forest landscapes and mitigate climate change.” Actions companies and investors can take to support FFPOs therefore include strengthening FFPO organisations in their multiple levels, building capacity for risk assessment and resilience responses within FFPO groups, scaling up peer-to-peer exchanges around climate resilience and channeling more climate finance through FFPOs.

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