What Is the evidence base for climate-smart agriculture in East and Southern Africa? A systematic map

More than 500 million USD will soon be invested in climate-smart agriculture (CSA) programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. Improving smallholder farm management is the core of most of these programmes. However, there has been no comprehensive information available to evaluate how changing agricultural practices increases food production, improves resilience of farming systems and livelihoods, and mitigates climate change—the goals of CSA. Here, we present a systematic map—an overview of the availability of scientific evidence—for CSA in five African countries: Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Zambia. We conducted a systematic literature search of the effects of 102 technologies, including farm management practices (e.g., leguminous intercropped agroforestry, increased protein content of livestock diets, etc.), on 57 indicators consistent with CSA goals (e.g., yield, water use efficiency, carbon sequestration, etc.) as part of an effort called the “CSA Compendium”. Our search of peer-reviewed articles in Web of Science and Scopus produced 150,567 candidate papers across developing countries in the global tropics. We screened titles, abstracts and full texts against predetermined inclusion criteria, for example that the investigation took place in a tropical developing country and contains primary data on how both a CSA practice and non-CSA control affect a preselected indicator. More than 1500 papers met these criteria from Africa, of which, 153 contained data collected in one of the five countries. Mapping the studies shows geographic and topical clustering in a few locations, around relatively few measures of CSA and for a limited number of commodities, indicating potential for skewed results and highlighting gaps in the evidence. This study sets the baseline for the availability of evidence to support CSA programming in the five countries