Attachments
INTRODUCTION
Increasingly, companies recognize the need to plan for climate change to mitigate risk and realize commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or other sustainability targets. Food and beverage companies in particular seek to evaluate the physical risks and, in some cases, opportunities associated with climate change within their supply chains. Ultimately, companies seek to translate climate risk intelligence into practical, operational strategies to build supply chain resilience. This guide offers food and beverage companies a working definition of climate resilience, plus an actionable process guide and sample indicator framework for diagnosing climate resilience in smallholder crop-focused supply chains.
For companies sourcing from smallholders, evaluating resilience to climate change poses particular challenges. Smallholder sourcing entails working with many, diverse farmer communities around the globe, each with its own agricultural practices, cultural context, and risk exposure. Moreover, companies often lack fine-grain visibility into smallholder performance due to the length of their supply chains. Even companies closer to smallholder farmers may seek guidance on how to translate data on climate risk and smallholder performance into targeted action plans across their sourcing geographies.
The guide breaks down the complex concept of resilience into manageable themes and suggests a five-step process for applying these themes with particular suppliers – namely smallholder farmers and intermediary aggregators (e.g., farmer cooperatives, small private processors) – to better understand and manage climate risk:
- Know your risk: Identifying threatened geographies and crops
- Know your farmers: Identifying where risk sits in your supply chain
- Know your resilience: Matching risk to resilience capacity
- Know how to build resilience: Designing strategy or targeted interventions in response to diagnostic findings
- Know your progress: Monitoring through continuous measurement
For readers interested in more detailed guidance on measurement methodology, indicators, or implementation, the guide includes references to external resources and potential partners with expertise in resilience monitoring and evaluation.
The guide draws from the collective experience of the USAID Feed the Future Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience (Learning Community), a consortium comprised of climate scientists from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT); the multi-stakeholder learning platform of the Sustainable Food Lab; and the agricultural lender Root Capital. The Learning Community offers this guide as a living document and welcomes input from readers. For more information, please contact Kealy Sloan at ksloan@sustainablefood.org or Elizabeth Teague at eteague@rootcapital.org.
This guide is designed for medium- to high-level decision-makers in food and beverage companies who are a) interested in smallholder climate resilience as a means of securing supply, and b) seeking guidance on creating resilience diagnostics and/or performance measurement plans. The guide is not intended as a detailed implementation guide for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) professionals, although it includes links to common resilience indicators and potential M&E partners (see Resources).
Food and beverage companies play different roles in the supply chain, with different degrees of visibility into and control over farm-level realities, and that these roles will shape companies’ motivations and options for engaging around smallholder resilience. This guide does not assume that all companies would or should engage in resilience interventions at the farm level. Rather, it offers an approach to framing smallholder resilience that could be used at various levels: to inform internal strategy, conversations with experienced third-party implementers or downstream suppliers, or sector-wide collaboration.