Candid insights and collaboration: Climate Conversations to catalyse action
23rd November 2023
In February this year, SAI Platform’s Crops Working Group initiated the Climate Conversations webinar series. Already this series has held six events to date featuring 20 experts, and engaging 130+ participants. The webinars have facilitated broadening discussion on agricultural GHG emissions mitigation and resilience building across SAI Platform member value chains. The series has garnered praise for offering candid insights, key learning points and practical solutions while aiding members to take informed action at various stages on their climate journey.
Sessions have covered diverse topics from data collection tools, soil carbon measurement, and effective business models for supplier and farmer engagement at a farm and landscape level.
The most recent sessions have featured insights from ADM, Heineken, Nestlé, and PepsiCo, showcasing low carbon farming programmes and landscape-based initiatives like LENs (Landscape Enterprise Networks), aiming to enhance ecosystem resilience and meet climate commitments.
Key insights from the recent sessions include:
- Trusting relationships are critical for farmers participation. Collaboration with existing trusted local partners can support this.
- Participatory approaches which emphasise farmers perspectives and enable co-design of solutions are more effective than prescribing top-down changes.
- A context specific value proposition for farmers is key. This may include risk mitigating financial mechanisms, and/or technical support.
- Farm level emissions baselines enable the design of bespoke mitigation and resilience building interventions for farmers. However, the process needs to be streamlined and provide value back.
- Cover cropping, no-till, and fertiliser reduction are among the most widely adopted climate smart practices in leading industry initiatives. Quantifying their impacts and integrating reductions into corporate inventories remains a challenge.
- Collaboration along the value chain is crucial to scale initiatives, with brands coordinating but suppliers and agronomy partners leading implementation.
- LENs provides an example of an effective model for Collaboration across landscapes, which meets the above criteria. It facilitates collaboration between organisations that depend on shared landscapes to fund and implement landscape resilience initiatives. LENs aims to engage farmers as business partners in developing tailored solutions, through a competitive bidding process.
“It has been inspiring to hear the insights shared across our diverse community. As we navigate this evolving landscape, the need for continued collaboration, open sharing, and collective problem solving is as key now, as ever!”
Robyn Cooper, Crops Manager, SAI Platform
Future plans involve continuing the successful series with more sessions, and broadening member engagement to the whole SAI Platform membership. Upcoming topics include diverse business models, overcoming ‘carbon tunnel vision’, and aligning farm level actions with corporate commitments along the value chain. SAI Platform looks forward to further engaging its community in this vital conversation!