Diversification for climate resilience: Thirty options for forest and farm producer organisations

This report is written for representatives of forest and farm producer organisations (FFPOs) and their technical support partners. It aims to build confidence in an approach and options for how FFPOs strengthen climate resilience to the benefit of local forest and farm producers. The report outlines why climate resilience matters and what it is. It introduces a climate framework and how to build it – including 30 practical climate-resilience options. It includes new analysis of 10 international climate-resilience case studies that show the extraordinary extent to which FFPOs are pushing ahead with climate-resilience options. A secondary target audience is that of donors and government decision-makers who can upscale financial support for strengthening climate resilience to FFPOs based on their effectiveness in that area.

The paper details five pathways to scale up the beneficial impacts of FFPO climate-resilience action – including poverty reduction, biodiversity conservation, forest landscape restoration and climate change mitigation. The close fit between globally accepted generic principles for resilience and the day-to-day characteristics of FFPOs argues for them playing a more central role in bringing about the climate resilience that is important to everyone. Building climate resilience requires two interrelated processes of risk assessment followed by adaptive resilience responses. Resilience responses include actions of persistence, adaptation and transformation that can also be thought of as applying at the level of an individual, a group or a system. Responses involve practical actions in four different dimensions of resilience: socio-cultural, ecological, economic, and physical and technological infrastructure.