Making climate solutions work for women in agri-food systems: Building an evidence base to catalyze action

Climate resilient agri-food systems are critical for global food security and public health. Within these systems, vulnerable socio-economic groups, particularly women, bear the brunt of disproportionate impacts of climate change, necessitating a re-evaluation of solution designs. Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA), acknowledged as a viable solution for sustainable agricultural development, is a holistic approach for enhancing productivity, supporting adaptation and mitigation, and bolstering farmers’ resilience. However, its adoption and impact hinge significantly on persistent gender inequalities in agricultural contexts.
Women, constituting approximately 43% of the agricultural labor force, confront disparities in land rights, access, and resources that influence their abilities to cope and adapt to climate change. Their challenges extend beyond effective participation in food production to the difficulties in accessing markets, credit, information, and technologies. Climate change compounds these challenges and imposes an additional burden on them to sustainably manage both food and livelihood security. Such increasing vulnerability of women in agriculture poses questions on the potential of CSA to generate impact at scale. Gender-smart climate solutions hold immense potential to integrate women into agricultural value chains and generate cascading effects on poverty reduction, improved health, and enhanced food security. To bridge this knowledge gap on whether and to what extent CSA works for women, CGIAR’s Gender Impact platform worked with various partners and experts to build an evidence base to inform climate-smart agricultural solutions that are gender-responsive. A meta-synthesis of the research outputs including evidence and gap map, learning agenda and a series of systematic and scoping reviews on various dimensions of CSA and gender provide a nuanced understanding on how women can drive climate change responses when solutions are tailored to their needs. In essence, the evidence emphasizes the necessity to integrate gender-responsive and climate-smart approaches for timely course correction and an equitable evolution of CSA practices.