Panel Discussion
Urgency: Since climate change is affecting food and farming now, we need to speed up the pace of adaptation, and to achieve mitigation benefits wherever possible.
Question: How much is climate change affecting stallholder farmers in China? How much trouble are they in? What’s the worst case?
Investment: We need to increase the proportion of climate finance going into adaptation, and to secure a flow of resources to locations and populations where adaptation needs are greatest.
Question: What type of creative finance do small farmers need (such as insurance products to improve both risk management and access to capital for adaptation actions)
Knowledge: Since climate change is not static, we will continually need to generate and share new knowledge, extending the information revolution into fields, forests and fisheries in remote localities.
Question: How can traditional knowledge be integrated to assess the crazy weather tied to climate change?
Value chains: We need to pay more attention to how food value chains are managed, to deal with climate risks, secure affordable and nutritious food supplies for poor consumers, improve the links for small producers and processors to stable markets, whether local or distant.
Question: Do value chains really help the climate? How to improve the links for small producers to stable markets? Should be only local or also distant?
Breeding: We need to invest now in farmer-led and science-led breeding, as it is demonstrably one of the most effective adaptation measures to the 2030s, and requires 8-20 year lead times for release of new varieties of crops and livestock.
Question: Will biotechnology help small farmers? How?
