photo credit: Root Capital
The Climate Action for Smallholders Coalition (CASH Coalition) works to make regenerative agriculture and climate action profitable for smallholder farmers.
Smallholder and indigenous farmers stand to gain the most from an inclusive, fair, and equitable carbon finance system and are uniquely positioned to advance solutions to address biodiversity loss, poverty, food security, and development. These communities must play a vital role in mitigating climate change and should be rewarded for their actions.
We aim to accelerate the smallholder regenerative transition and catalyze climate action at scale through:
- CASH identifies and shares knowledge and best practices regarding existing technologies, practices, financing arrangements, incentive structures, behavior change and adoption, costs and benefits, and scaling strategies to accelerate a smallholder regenerative transition. We are actively developing a repository of regenerative content focused on smallholder agriculture to i) accelerate awareness and uptake across the Coalition; ii) support members, the Coalition, and eventually the field-at-large to leverage generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools as a strategy to scale smallholder farmer access to quality, locally relevant, regenerative advice.
- We provide technical assistance, information, and education to our members and local partners to amplify the voices of smallholder farmers and increase their ability to derive benefits from climate finance and PES.
- We expand existing avenues for participation, create new entry points to climate financing arrangements, and transform climate finance by advocating for reforms to existing carbon markets, standards, and relevant regulatory instruments to ensure that markets and instruments work for smallholders and recognize and value smallholder nature-based solutions and ecosystem services. We identify ways for smallholders to tap into non-carbon climate finance. We are developing a portfolio of projects to advance these objectives, identify and overcome practical barriers inhibiting smallholder projects from accessing carbon and other climate finance, and inform learning and advocacy to promote systems change.
- We catalyze the development and execution of ground-up research to build business models and use cases demonstrating the viability of smallholder regenerative and climate actions. We leverage this learning to inform advocacy, project development, and further research.