Climate-smart farming adaptation in Nepal featured on Agrilinks and Climatelinks

A blog posted on both Agrilinks and Climatelinks features a family that successfully adopted climate-smart farming practices in Nepal with support from the Feed the Future KISAN II project implemented by Winrock International.

“Adaptation at the top of the world” tells the story of Surendra Bahadur Rana and his brothers, who once relied on seasonal rains to cultivate both cereal crops and seasonal vegetables including pumpkins and cucumbers on their family’s farm. But as the weather became increasingly erratic and rain patterns changed, their yields began to suffer. Millions of other smallholder farmers around the world face the same challenge due to extreme weather including floods, droughts and fires as the climate warms.

The Ranas decided to make climate-smart changes on their farm, supported by USAID through a Feed the Future (FTF) initiative, the KISAN II (Knowledge-based Integrated Sustainable Agriculture in Nepal II) project. They built greenhouses to protect their crops from extreme weather and grow a wider variety of crops year-round, diversified their business by adding a sustainable poultry operation, and are exploring new crops that require less water. They’ve increased both yields and incomes, now selling 15-20 metric tons of vegetables a year, and have helped other farmers in Nepal learn about and adopt climate-smart practices, too.

Along with global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change, countries and small agribusiness owners like the Ranas need support to adapt. The President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE) is the U.S. government’s first whole-of-government, international climate adaptation program. Its goal is to help more than half a billion people in developing countries adapt to and manage the impacts of climate change by 2030.

“PREPARE is building upon years of the U.S. government’s adaptation work, and because it has a base to work from, programs under PREPARE will help the world adapt even faster, through the expansion of things we know work,” Jenna Jadin, of USAID’s Bureau for Resilience and Food Security, wrote in the blog.

Read the full post on Agrilinks or on Climatelinks.