Climate-smart agriculture

Targets

We support projects that aim to generate impact by increasing:

  • Number of people reached by a service or intervention
  • Number of people with improved resilience(improved incomes for smallholder farmers )
  • organisations improving resilience(risk knowledge,financial revenues etc)
  • Financial assets mobilised
  • Environmental benefit (tonnes of CO2 emissions avoided)

 

The projects we approved in the period 2019-2021 aim to improve the resilience of 770 000 farming households, with 64 000 already confirmed by the end of 2021 and more to come as implementation of the projects continues.

Why it matters

Climate change is already affecting the agriculture and food security. Higher temperatures, more frequent extreme weather events, water shortages and rising sea levels – all could seriously compromise the ability of agriculture to feed the world’s most vulnerable people, impeding progress toward the eradication of hunger, malnutrition and poverty. Moreover, agriculture itself is a major contributor to climate change.

Declines in food productivity would directly hurt millions of low-income smallholder farmers, especially subsistence farmers in developing countries, by reducing supply and increasing prices. Smallholders bear more of the risks of climate change than other agricultural producers because they have fewer resources to mitigate the stresses it creates. They also lack the resources required to increase carbon sequestration on their land.

For all these reasons, the Swiss Re Foundation is committed to promoting climate-smart agriculture. By the end of 2024, we aim to improve resilience of 700 000 farming households with our projects.

Definition

Climate-smart agriculture focuses on measures to:

  • Sustainably increase productivity
  • Enhance resilience (adaptation)
  • Reduce/remove greenhouse gases where possible (mitigation)
  • Advance achievement of food security and development goals

Our target group

We focus on the 270 million smallholder farmers in low-income countries in Asia and Africa as they are highly exposed to climate and weather risks and supply 80% of food in markets where the population is rising fastest.

Areas of support

We focus on the following three areas of engagement:

  1. Agriculture monitoring based on earth observation data. We support the development of new scalable, transferable methodologies and approaches that leverage earth observation data to inform monitoring of where and when food is grown and where and when shortfalls can be expected in the future.
  2. Advisory services. We support the smallholder farmers’ transition to climate-smart technologies and approaches that have already won over a large network of farmers and intermediaries, include digital tools for knowledge-sharing and collection and support access to business planning and financial instruments.
  3. Insurance solutions reaching smallholder farmers. We’re currently defining our role in this area.

Further Information