Resource conservation, community participation and tools for screening climate smart practices in natural resource management

Natural resources continue to play an important role in livelihood and wellbeing of millions. Over exploitation and degradation of natural resource base have led to declining factor productivity in rural areas and dwindling farm profits coupled with debilitating impact on human health. This necessitates promoting technologies that can help producing food keeping pace with the growing population while conserving natural resource base and be profitable. Achieving this conflicting target though appears to be challenging but is possible with the currently available technologies. This lecture will provide insights into a gamut of resource conserving technologies, the role of communities in promoting them and tools that can help in identifying suitable technologies for adoption. The lecture will heavily borrow sustainable agriculture cases from the Asia Pacific region.

Outline
•    Natural resource dependency and rural development
o Trends in resource depletion and impact on food production
o Farm profitability trends and input use
o Trends in factor productivity
•    Resource conserving technologies and climate smart agriculture
o What are they?
o Similarities and differences
o Costs and benefits of pursuing them
•    Tools for identifying resource conserving and climate smart agriculture technologies
o Factor productivity
o Benefit cost ratios
o Marginal abatement costs
•    Role of communities
o Communities as entry point
o Benefits of community participation
•    Concluding thoughts
o How to scale up resource conservation?