With global temperatures already 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, climate change is having major impacts on agriculture that fall disproportionately on the Global South—from crops, to livestock, to aquaculture. Agricultural systems endure frequent heat waves, flooding, and drought—often all in one season. Climate-related extreme weather events such as intense rainstorms pose a serious threat to crops. The agriculture sector, in turn, continues to be a major global contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, an obstacle to efforts to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees.

Averting rising crop losses requires developing policies and programs that help the agricultural sector—and particularly small-scale producers in the Global South—adapt to climate impacts and reduce GHG emissions. Public extension services are key to this effort; they can help farmers survive climate-induced disasters and become more climate-resilient. Thus they are crucial both to climate action and to broader agricultural and food system transformation.

Yet public extension systems in developing countries face major challenges. They require strategic reforms, while climate-driven shocks are diverting the attention of policymakers away from long-term development towards emergency disaster response and recovery interventions. And while public extension systems play an indispensable role addressing agricultural disasters and recovery, they continue to be plagued by low operational budgets, weak technical capacity, organizational and coordination challenges, poor research-extension linkages, and unsupportive policy environments for building resiliency to face climate shocks.