Exploring how to scale up climate-smart agriculture in the Kericho-Mau Tea Landscape, Kenya. Ideas Marketplace presentation from Ecoagriculture Partners and The Rainforest Alliance. Presented at Agriculture, Landscapes and Livelihoods Day 5 in Doha Qatar, 3 December 2012. http://www.agricultureday.org

1. The Kericho-Mau Tea Landscape
Exploring How to Scale Up Climate-Smart Agriculture
The Challenge: The Opportunity:
Most of the focus of climate-smart agricul- Climate-smart landscapes are characterized not only by climate-smart practices at the
ture has been on farm-based sustainable farm-scale, but by diversity of land use and land use interactions throughout the land-
agricultural management practices. How- scape. Yet, despite the conceptual appeal of this approach, there is little information
ever, for climate-smart agriculture to available on how to operationalize such “climate-smart landscapes.”
achieve its many objectives, it is necessary If this approach is to gain wide support, a more detailed understanding of the opera-
for planning and intervention to move tional aspects of the approach is needed. EcoAgriculture Partners and the Rainforest
beyond the farm to the landscape scale. Alliance addressed this gap by developing a participatory assessment tool.
Using the Participatory Assessment Tool
We deployed the assessment tool in the Kericho-Mau region of Western Kenya–an important tea-growing region and watershed where agriculture
and ecosystem services are expected to be strongly affected by climate change.
The Rainforest Alliance applied the tool through consultations with tea
industry stakeholders including representatives from business, govern-
ment, NGOs, research institutions, and donors.
The objective of the assessment was to help the Rainforest Alliance:
Understand the operating context and breadth of existing activities to
support climate-smart agriculture, implemented by various actors in a
given landscape;
Assess and suggest primary opportunities for upscaling the adoption
of climate-smart agricultural practices at a landscape-level;
Identify sources of finance that could be tapped to support upscaling
climate-smart activities with a particular focus on emerging climate
finance opportunities.
Findings:
We suggest that a structured assessment tool of Increasing climate-smart education and train- Such a model would harness existing sustainabil-
the sort deployed in Kericho-Mau can help align ing initiatives; ity commitments and growing global demand for
disparate actors and finance sources to translate Optimizing fuelwood consumption and sus- certification to train hundreds of thousands of
climate-smart landscape concepts to reality in tainably managing eucalyptus; producers, while leveraging government and pri-
rural landscapes around the world. Supporting a 'community of practice' to facili- vate sector investment to secure the long-term
In the case of Kericho-Mau, the multinational tate knowledge and technology transfer be- implementation of these practices.
companies, research institutions and tween multinationals and smallholders;
government regulatory and development Building local economic resilience via product
agencies that comprise the tea industry are diversification and value addition, including
doing a great deal to address climate change. A
linchpin in these efforts are commitments from
through blending and packing.
In this context, climate finance sources would be
For more information
the Kenya Tea Development Agency and Seth Shames at sshames@ecoagriculture.org
used to leverage existing value chain invest-
multinational brands to certify their tea under Mark Moroge at mmoroge@ra.org
ments in sustainable tea production. Two prior-
the Rainforest Alliance Certified sustainable
TM
ity areas of investment could include programs
agriculture standards.
to cover smallholder costs of adoption of CSA
Building upon this strong foundation, opportu- practices, and policy and coordination work that
nities to upscale sustainable, climate-smart ac- existing private sector investment is unlikely to
tivities from the farm to the landscape include: cover.