Introduction and background
The transformation of agricultural and food systems is pivotal for addressing the challenges of global hunger and ensuring the achievement of sustainable development. The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement, for example, outline numerous strategies and measures for transforming agricultural and food systems. However, to achieve these global goals, climate considerations must be integrated across all implementation levels, i.e. projects to policies along with robust mechanisms to monitor the progress on the interventions. In this context, the broader objective of this project is to disentangle the complex nature of sustainable transformations for agricultural and food systems and to identify and assess methods and indicators for measuring and tracking progress on adaptation and mitigation goals in agricultural and food systems.
Project approach
The project has a three-pronged approach to achieve the above-mentioned objective:
- Development of a working definition for a transformation to climate-resilient and low-emission agricultural and food systems: A working definition will be proposed based on the internationally acknowledged scientific evidence, thus providing a common framework for policy, research and practice to identify transformative approaches and measure progress towards transformation at different levels.
- Development of a guideline for the systematic evaluation of the impact of climate-resilient and low-emission adaptation measures in agricultural and food systems: A guideline for indicators and methods will be formulated for impact evaluation of transformation pathways in different development contexts. The guideline lists scientific methods for impact evaluation, discusses their advantages and disadvantages, assesses them in terms of data requirements, the effort required for implementation (e.g. in the context of international development cooperation) and its generalizability with respect to scale, time and adaptation measure.
- Assessment of the potential of earth observation to support monitoring and understanding transformational adaptation across scales: Lastly, the project will focus on exploring the potential and limitations of remote sensing data and methods (as demonstrated in research and applied cases) to support the monitoring and evaluation of climate-resilient and low-emission agricultural adaptation at various geographic scales. The objective is to explore alternative methods to better capture certain indicators that cannot be covered by remote sensing.
Duration: October 2024 - December 2025
Funding agency: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH
Contact: Prof. Dr. Christoph Gornott (gornott@pik-potsdam.de) and Dr. Lisa Murken (murken@pik-potsdam.de)
