Editing IPCC:AR6/SR15/Chapter-5 (section)

== Box 5.1 Ecosystem- and Community-Based Practices in Drylands ==

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Drylands face severe challenges in building climate resilience (Fuller and Lain, 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r146|146]]</sup> , yet small-scale farmers can play a crucial role as agents of change through ecosystem- and community-based practices that combine adaptation, mitigation and sustainable development.

Farmer managed natural regeneration (FMNR) of trees in cropland is practised in 18 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Timor-Leste, India and Haiti and has, for example, permitted the restoration of over five million hectares of land in the Sahel (Niang et al., 2014; Bado et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r147|147]]</sup> . In Ethiopia, the Managing Environmental Resources to Enable Transitions programme, which entails community-based watershed rehabilitation in rural landscapes, supported around 648,000 people, resulting in the rehabilitation of 25,400,000 hectares of land in 72 severely food-insecure districts across Ethiopia between 2012 and 2015 (Gebrehaweria et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r148|148]]</sup> . In India, local farmers have benefitted from watershed programmes across different agro-ecological regions (Singh et al., 2014; Datta, 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r149|149]]</sup> .

These low-cost, flexible community-based practices represent low-regrets adaptation and mitigation strategies. These strategies often contribute to strengthened ecosystem resilience and biodiversity, increased agricultural productivity and food security, reduced household poverty and drudgery for women, and enhanced agency and social capital (Niang et al., 2014; Francis et al., 2015; Kassie et al., 2015; Mbow et al., 2015; Reij and Winterbottom, 2015; Weston et al., 2015; Bado et al., 2016; Dumont et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r150|150]]</sup> . Small check dams in dryland areas and conservation agriculture can significantly increase agricultural output (Kumar et al., 2014; Agoramoorthy and Hsu, 2016; Pradhan et al., 2018) <sup>[[#fn:r151|151]]</sup> . Mitigation benefits have also been quantified (Weston et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r152|152]]</sup> ; for example, FMNR of more than five million hectares in Niger has sequestered 25–30 Mtonnes of carbon over 30 years (Stevens et al., 2014) <sup>[[#fn:r153|153]]</sup> .

However, several constraints hinder scaling-up efforts: inadequate attention to the socio-technical processes of innovation (Grist et al., 2017; Scoones et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r154|154]]</sup> , difficulties in measuring the benefits of an innovation (Coe et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r155|155]]</sup> , farmers’ inability to deal with long-term climate risk (Singh et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r156|156]]</sup> , and difficulties for matching practices with agro-ecological conditions and complementary modern inputs (Kassie et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r157|157]]</sup> . Key conditions to overcome these challenges include: developing agroforestry value chains and markets (Reij and Winterbottom, 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r158|158]]</sup> and adaptive planning and management (Gray et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r159|159]]</sup> . Others include inclusive processes giving greater voice to women and marginalized groups (MRFCJ, 2015a; UN Women and MRFCJ, 2016; Dumont et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r160|160]]</sup> , strengthening community land and forest rights (Stevens et al., 2014; Vermeulen et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r161|161]]</sup> , and co-learning among communities of practice at different scales (Coe et al., 2014; Reij and Winterbottom, 2015; Sinclair, 2016; Binam et al., 2017; Dumont et al., 2017; Epule et al., 2017) <sup>[[#fn:r162|162]]</sup> .

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