Climate Risk Management Increases Crop Yields and Strengthens Resilience in Kosovo

During its six years, the USAID Agricultural Growth and Rural Opportunities (USAID AGRO) Activity solidified and sustained its achievements by fully integrating climate risk management (CRM) into its agricultural development approach. As part of USAID “Climate Risk Management in Action” series, Abt developed a case study that describes how CRM helped the Activity meet its primary goals of boosting the competitiveness of Kosovo’s agriculture sector, raising farmer incomes, and generating new job opportunities.

USAID AGRO’s CRM work helped protect USAID’s investments in Kosovo’s rapidly developing agricultural sector while building partners’ capacity to manage current and projected climate impacts on agricultural production and grow their operations sustainably. CRM actions produced important benefits for USAID AGRO and its partners, including yield increases ranging from 50-300 percent for key fruit and vegetable crops, reduced water demand of up to approximately 4,000 m3/ha for certain crops, avoided crop losses from extreme temperatures and precipitation events, created additional jobs and income for women farm workers, and enhanced capacity of strategic partners, including 7,308 farmers.

Ultimately, the Activity demonstrated that CRM can deliver tangible benefits to beneficiaries while helping USAID protect its investments from climate impacts as strong, resilient partners are applying the knowledge they gained through work with USAID AGRO to maintain CRM actions.

This piece was originally published on ClimateLinks and the full version can be accessed here.