Cultivating a Just Climate Philanthropy

Dusabimana Consolee, a farmer from Nyamagabe in Rwanda, operates a tree nursery that produces tens of thousands of tree seedlings for her community, which struggles with deforestation.

A potent brew of untapped opportunity and climate injustice is putting smallholder farmers of the world in a bind. These farmers, who typically farm on just one to five acres of land and number 50 million strong in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, face some of the most acute effects of climate change. Most of them rely on rainfed agriculture, leaving them open to shocks like droughts and storms that can wipe out their crops and leave them without enough food to see their families through the year. However, virtually none of the financing the global community has marshaled to fight climate change is directed toward them, and they feature in almost no high-level policy conversations about climate priorities. Smallholder farmers are left to tackle livelihood-threatening challenges on their own dime, though they had almost no hand in creating them.

There are three main reasons to put smallholder farmers front and center in the global climate agenda. First, supporting climate adaptation (practices that help people adjust to the effects of climate change) for smallholders is an incredibly efficient way to improve the lives of the global poor. This is especially relevant at a time when the planet is behind on several SDGs, including those related to poverty reduction and food security. Given that farmers represent up to 80 percent of people facing hunger and poverty, shoring up their resilience to shocks that cut into their incomes and food supply is one of the best investments for accomplishing our development goals as a planet.

Second, there is huge, untapped potential for climate mitigation (efforts to reduce or prevent greenhouse gas emissions), given the scope of land smallholders manage globally. Some estimates indicate that as much as 40 percent of the world’s farmland is stewarded by smallholders. These farming families can play a significant role in mitigating climate change if they’re equipped with tools to maximize the environmental gains their land can deliver.

Finally, there is a moral imperative to support people who are both the least responsible for and the most vulnerable to climate change. Even if investing in smallholder farmers didn’t offer the enormous mitigation opportunity that it does, those of us in the West, who have predominantly driven climate change, would still have an ethical duty to help ease the challenges it creates for them and help achieve climate justice.

Enife Matemba’s experience offers a poignant illustration of this need to invest in smallholders. Matemba is a farmer working with our organization, One Acre Fund, which assists more than 1.5 million smallholder farming families in Africa to improve their yields, incomes, and resilience. Her farm in Mulanje, Malawi, was hit by Cyclone Ana in early 2022. The region was flooded for three days, and half her field was buried in sand and boulders the heavy rain had washed in. The damage to her farm is irreparable, and she is now left without a sufficient source of income for herself and her family. “After the heavy rains, when I went into my fields, almost half was gone. And the rest, from the water logging, were turning yellow and their leaves were all torn … my harvests were low, so I didn’t get any income, [and] the maize price is very high right now because people in this area didn’t harvest.” As climate change continues to advance, livelihood-destroying weather events like Cyclone Ana will only grow more common.

Smallholder farmer Enife Matemba sits in her damaged fields. (Photo courtesy of One Acre Fund)

Despite the clear case for supporting them, smallholders are virtually excluded from global climate finance and policy. Astoundingly, only 1.7 percent of the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated for global climate finance goes to smallholders, according to a recent International Fund for Agricultural Development study. This lack of investment has real, appreciable effects on farmers’ lives. A weather shock could mean a total failure of a farmer’s crop, setting up their family for months of meal-skipping and a severely curtailed income that makes it impossible to pay for things like school fees.

The magnitude of the problem warrants philanthropy and aid at scale. Efficiently rewarding farmers for adopting nature-based climate mitigation solutions—including agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, and farm- and household-based mitigation—can provide them the means to meet their basic needs while further adapting their lands and practices to climate change.

Smallholder Agroforestry

One high-potential opportunity is smallholder-led tree planting. One Acre Fund is building a scalable agroforestry program that would see some of the poorest farmers on the planet plant 1 billion trees over the next decade, delivering not just carbon sequestration but also other localized environmental benefits to soil health, erosion prevention, and biodiversity. By the end of 2022, we’ll have cumulatively supported smallholder farmers to plant more than 140 million trees across 9 countries.

Francoise Dusabima, a Rwandan farmer who lost several harvests to weather-related landslides worked with One Acre Fund three years ago to plant 22 trees around the border of her land to prevent erosion. “Now when I farm, I feel safe,” she says. “I know every season that I will harvest something, and I’m not worried about landslides carrying my crops away.”

Smallholder farmer Francoise Dusabima next to one of her trees. (Photo courtesy of One Acre Fund)

However, while providing farmers with direct funding for tree planting is helpful, traditional donor funding won’t be enough to provide trees to all 50 million farmers in Africa. Global carbon markets, which allow carbon emitters to purchase “offset” credits from groups that have reduced carbon levels in the atmosphere, can help fill this gap by incentivizing mitigation while compensating people for carbon-fighting practices like tree planting. The challenge is that carbon markets weren't designed to work for people in poverty. Most are designed for groups that have land title and steward thousands of trees across large tracts of land; this scale and regularity makes the trees easy to count and monitor efficiently. Smallholder farmers, by contrast, may not have a formal land title and may plant just one or two dozen trees a year non-contiguously across their land. They may also live in a remote location that would be costly for measurement and evaluation teams to reach. Under existing carbon market standards, they would be ineligible or too expensive to enroll in a certified carbon project, and therefore without the means to invest in their own resilience.

For smallholders to gain access to carbon markets, philanthropists need to model climate-just decision-making and invest in infrastructure. This includes investments in improving remote-sensing tech, which is not currently sensitive enough to accurately analyze changes in farms smaller than one acre. Improved tech would enable efficient measurement of tree survival and growth at the small-farm level by obviating the need to pay for in-person monitoring.

Even with these changes, however, the offset credits smallholder farmers generate will always be more expensive than the ones larger planters (which have access to economies of scale) produce. Corporations that buy credits need to recognize that smallholder-generated credits deliver more social impact because they direct resources to the most vulnerable and get comfortable paying a slight premium for them. In addition, carbon registries, which set the measurement standards planters need to meet for markets to sell their credits and which must of course maintain their commitment to rigor, need to design measurement protocols that are realistic in smallholder contexts.

Regenerative Agriculture

A second compelling climate finance opportunity that’s ripe for scaled philanthropic investment is regenerative agriculture. This is an emerging set of practices such as protecting soil with cover crops, introducing new organic matter like mulch or manure, and rotating crops that can rejuvenate depleted soils, reduce chemical use, and sequester carbon. This approach is a shift from traditional farming methods, and therefore requires investments in training and behavior change.

However, while using these methods over time makes fields more productive and profitable, the transition to regenerative practices typically coincides with a few years of smaller crop yields that smallholder farmers don’t have the means to absorb. Again here, grants, concessional lending, results-based finance, and other types of philanthropy can be catalytic. By subsidizing initial losses, donors can support smallholders during the transition to regenerative farming and help put millions of hectares of land under more sustainable management. Organizations such as Root Capital, Farm Africa, and others are also leading the way by deploying innovative projects that use regenerative approaches like minimizing soil disturbance, planting cover crops, and introducing organic matter into the soil.

Farm and Household Mitigation

In recent years, there’s been an explosion in what’s known as payment for ecosystem services (PES): financial incentives to take mitigation steps that might not otherwise deliver a sufficient economic benefit. At the smallholder farmer level, these solutions include paying farmers to forgo the use of proximate natural resources like forests or peat bogs, use water resources more sustainably, or use appliances like clean cookstoves and solar lights that displace fuels like firewood and kerosene.

An early example of a successful initiative of this type is the Costa Rican government’s 1997 PES program, which paid landowners to reforest and protect existing trees. Over the course of 8 years, this USAID-funded initiative grew the country’s forest cover by nearly 17 percent.

These types of small, farm-level acts of climate mitigation repeated 50 million times over in Africa clearly hold significant promise for environmental stewardship, but the related financing vehicles often lack the design principles, tech solutions, and funder willpower needed to adequately include and reward farmers at the smallholder level. For instance, as is the case in carbon markets, it can be challenging to monitor program compliance across millions of small, remote farms. Again, climate philanthropists hold the key to overcoming market failure by investing in tech and programmatic solutions to address these issues. By directing resources to these high-potential initiatives, philanthropy can replicate success stories like Costa Rica’s around the world.

The 2022 UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) marks an occasion for philanthropists and social sector leaders interested in climate change to consider how their work could better support the most climate vulnerable. This year’s conference includes official pavilions focused on food systems for the first time ever. This is an encouraging step in the right direction, but we need a much greater commitment to finding ways to bring smallholder farmers into the global climate solution. Climate justice should be at the center of all climate work, not at the periphery, and while it comes with challenges, it also presents huge opportunities.

Read more stories by Claire McGuinness & Matthew Forti.