Countries are putting forward climate change mitigation actions in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to meet PAris Agreement goals. As of December 2015, 16 countries had provided costs associated with agricultural and land use mitigation measures.
Estimated costs ranged from USD 2.5 million for a specific project to reduce slash-and-burn agriculture in the Central African Republic to USD 1.8 billion plan to implement sustainable intensification of rice, biodigesters, agroforestry systems, and assisted natural regeneration of degraded lands in Senegal. These wildly different estimations and planning strategies illustrate the lack of data countries have available to them to estimate the costs of mitigation.
We do know that developing countries will require a significant amount of financing to successfully implement the climate actions required to meet mitigation targets in their NDCs. Countries need cost data to implement their NDCs and build a business case for financing climate change mitigation and adaptation. The challenge now is to fill in the cost data gap, especially for climate-smart agriculture technologies that benefit smallholder farmers.
With the support of CCAFS, I gathered information and analyzed the costs and benefits of two climate-smart agriculture practices: alternate wetting and drying (AWD) in paddy rice production in Bangladesh and Vietnam and improved nitrogen fertilizer management in cereal production (rice, wheat, and maize) in India and Mexico. I also completed an analysis of the costs of monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of climate change mitigation in agriculture in all four countries.