Climate Smart (AgTech) Agricultural Technologies: The Next Billion Dollar Opportunity
Channel: Sankalp Forum
Date: 2020-11-06

Agriculture is the primary source of income for majority of the world population that resides in the rural areas. The sector is expected to be worst hit from the challenges arising from rapid climate change that is causing events such as increasing sea levels, changes in precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events, among others. With changing climate there is a need to design and develop solutions that inherently support resilience and adaptation to this change. Failing to do so will have significant negative effects on smallholder farmers that constitute majority of the farming population especially in low income countries. For instance, a study by economic survey on climate change and agriculture in India (2018) says that Climate Change could reduce annual agricultural incomes by almost 15-18%.  
In the recent past, technological solutions have been developed for most of the aspects of the agriculture value chains: from pre to post harvest stages. Most of these technologies, however, focus on improving productivity, ensuring better price realisation for the farmers, ensuring information dissemination, and providing backward and forward linkages to farmers 
without having an intentional focus on building adaptation and resilience to climate change. In addition, apart from the need to mitigate the risks from changing weather and climatic conditions, technological solutions are also needed to lower the carbon footprint of agriculture. The sector is one of the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for almost one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emission. 
Hence, while the newer technologies that are developed with the aim to support farmers need to be applauded there is a rising need to ensure such technologies also integrate elements of climate smart agriculture in their offerings. In practice, climate smart agricultural technologies can be bucketed into three clusters: 
• Technologies that help farmers adapt to and mitigate the risks of climate change by helping save water, energy, emit less harmful gases, with use of data and smart solutions that can adapt to changes to changes of climate  
• Technologies that introduce new ways of undertaking farming that are inherently climate smart: hydroponics, aeroponics, vertical farming, etc.  
• Technologies that make agricultural supply chains more climate smart and resilient to climate change 
Globally pioneering organizations focused on sustainable development such as the World Bank Group, UN and FAO have recognized the need for encouraging a shift to climate smart agricultural solutions. This focus coupled with a growing evidence base of climate change related disasters, is expected to increase the demand for such solutions in the coming future. The urgency in the need would be amplified in the near future with a shift in focus by other development agencies across the globe in favour of climate smart agriculture. Having seen the potential of ag-tech solutions in the last decade to support evidential change in the lives of smallholder farmers, is there a possibility that climate smart agricultural technologies are likely to be the next crowd-puller? Will such technologies be seen as the next billion dollar investment opportunity for the global investing community, especially for the ones focused on driving positive impact on people, planet, and prosperity?  
This session aims to answer the following key questions:
1. How can the ecosystem define climate smart agricultural technologies? 
2. How different are climate smart agricultural technologies in comparison to other agricultural technology solutions? 
3. How urgent is the need for climate smart agricultural technologies? What are the challenges that could arise in scaling such technologies? 
4. Who are key stakeholders that could play a key role in designing, developing, deploying, and commercializing such technologies? 


This session is supported by Intellecap.