A Participatory Approach to Assessing the Climate-Smartness of Agricultural Interventions: The Lushoto Case

Here, it is described a new participatory protocol for assessing the climate-smartness of agricultural interventions in smallholder practices. This identifies farm-level indicators (and indices) for the food security and adaptation pillars of CSA. It also supports the participatory scoring of indicators, enabling baseline and future assessments of climate-smartness to be made. The protocol was tested among 72 farmers implementing a variety of CSA interventions in the climate-smart village of Lushoto, Tanzania. Farmers especially valued interventions that improved soil fertility and structure, reduced surface runoff, and reclaimed degraded land due to the positive impacts on yield and off-season crop agriculture. Mostly, the CSA interventions increased animal production, food production, consumption and income. The protocol is easy to adapt to different regions and farming systems and allows for the better prioritisation of interventions. But we recommend that CSA is adopted as part of a monitoring, evaluation and learning process