AgriAdapt 

Climate change is already affecting global agricultural value chains and the lives and livelihoods of those who depend on them. Climate change is slowing growth in global agricultural productivity and increasingly putting annual harvests and stored supplies at high risk of pests and disease. It is also decreasing the nutrional value of staple crops, especially in the more vulnerable regions of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. At the same time, global demand for food is projected to increase by 50-60% between 2019 and 2050. Agricultural stakeholders need to understand how climate risks and their exposure to them are changing, so that they can make plans, decisions and investments that will reduce vulnerability and build resilience.

Efforts to make agriculture more climate-resilient have so far largely focused on farming — just one link in the chain. Moving forward, governments, companies and other stakeholders need to think more comprehensively about building resilience all along agricultural value chains. Addressing this "missing middle" will be critical to feeding, clothing and employing the world's growing population amid a changing climate.

AgriAdapt informs decisionmakers about the changing climate risks they face, and ways to make production, processing, distribution, and storage more resilient. Our ultimate goal is to enhance the climate resilience of people working in the most vulnerable parts of these supply chains.

AgriAdapt was co-developed with agricultural decision-makers to provide free, reliable, accessible climate information to help them identify and understand the climate change risks they face and identify adaptation options. The beta version provides global, map-based and crop-specific data for coffee, cotton and rice value chains, as well as local data for India. It includes information on changing land use suitability, projected shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns and much more.

WRI designed and built the AgriAdapt through a collaborative, stakeholder-driven process. Through interviews, small group discussions and a workshop series, intended users of the tool guided its development by indicating what information is most important to them and in what format it would be most useful. WRI also partnered with key organizations for on-the-ground expertise and stakeholder outreach: Clima y Café in Colombia for the coffee value chain and the National Agro Foundation and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in India for the rice and cotton value chains.

Users of AgriAdapt can access and interact with data to identify current and future climate risks in value chains and regions of interest to them, and to explore adaptation resources to reduce those risks.

AgriAdapt is available in 4 languages—English, Spanish, Telugu and Tamil—and includes 3 main features:

2. The Crops page provides a narrative page for each selected crop (Coffee, Cotton, Rice), which uses data to tell the story of how climate change affects different parts of the value chain.
3. The Map page includes two different sections: In "Layers," users will find the complete catalog of data layers available in AgriAdapt, while the "Analysis" section permits aggregated analysis of the selected layers in specific geographic points selected by the user.
4. The Adaptation Resources Menu links to external sources on adaptation along the cotton and rice value chains, organized by climate risk.

For more information on the participatory approach taken to design and develop the tool, please see the working paper documenting the process: AgriAdapt: Strategies for Participatory Design and Development of a Climate Risk Tool.

AgriAdapt was made possible thanks to funding from the Walmart Foundation.

_{Cover Image by: Tea Tüür, WRI}