Key Details
The OECD Development Centre’s 2026 publication, Improving Environmental and Climate Outcomes in Agri-food Projects: A Guide for Development Practitioners, provides an indicator framework for integrating climate adaptation and mitigation into the design, monitoring and evaluation of agricultural-development projects.
Measurement area | What the guide proposes tracking |
|---|---|
Environmental condition | Biodiversity, soil erosion, soil organic carbon, water stress and water-use efficiency |
Changes in farm practices | Intercropping, crop diversification, agroforestry, integrated pest management and improved fertiliser use |
Long-term resilience | Climate-resilient infrastructure, early-warning access, agricultural insurance, income diversification and farmer training |
Climate mitigation | Net greenhouse-gas emissions, emissions intensity, carbon stored in soil and biomass, renewable-energy use and livestock emissions |
Financial viability | Changes in farm income associated with climate-friendly practices and revenue from verified carbon credits |
Policy connection | Whether project evidence informs national climate plans, incentives and wider programme design |
The guide draws on three CIHEAM Bari projects covering natural-resource management in Bosnia and Herzegovina, olive cultivation in Pakistan, and local crop diversity in Burkina Faso and Niger. India is included in the wider evidence on agricultural adaptation measures but is not evaluated as a country or project case study.
Outputs Do Not Establish Environmental Impact
Many agricultural projects report easily observed outputs—irrigation systems installed, hectares covered, farmers trained or technologies distributed. These figures show whether activities occurred, but not whether the project improved the underlying environment or reduced climate vulnerability.
The OECD framework separates three levels of adaptation evidence:
Physical outcomes: Did biodiversity, soil health or water conditions improve?
Behavioural change: Did farmers adopt the practices expected to produce those improvements?
Lasting resilience: Did communities gain insurance, diversified income, climate information and infrastructure that can withstand future shocks?
At least one indicator from each level should be monitored to avoid mistaking project delivery for demonstrated resilience.
Baselines Determine Whether Results Can Be Attributed to a Project
A measurement taken after implementation can describe conditions, but it cannot by itself show that the project caused them. The guide therefore recommends establishing an environmental and climate baseline before implementationand comparing subsequent results with that starting point.
Where feasible, similar farms or parcels outside the intervention can provide a comparison group. Without a baseline or credible counterfactual, positive changes may reflect rainfall, market conditions, other public programmes or farmers’ own decisions rather than the project.
This distinction is especially important for climate projects, where outcomes can take years to emerge and vary substantially with weather and location.
Carbon Claims Require Complete Project Boundaries
For mitigation, the guide recommends calculating net greenhouse-gas emissions in tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent. This involves adding emissions produced by project activities and subtracting emissions avoided or carbon sequestered relative to a business-as-usual baseline.
The calculation must cover relevant sources and sinks, including:
fuel and electricity used by machinery and infrastructure;
fertilisers, pesticides and livestock emissions;
processing, refrigeration and purchased inputs;
changes in soil organic carbon; and
carbon stored in above- and below-ground biomass.
The guide warns that incomplete boundaries can shift emissions outside the measured activity or result in double counting. Satellite observations can support land-use and vegetation monitoring, but field measurements and farm-level records remain necessary for variables such as fertiliser application, feed use and energy consumption.
Environmental Gains Must Also Work for Farmers
Climate-friendly practices will not persist if they substantially reduce income or expose farmers to costs they cannot absorb. The framework consequently treats changes in farm income as part of the assessment rather than as an issue separate from mitigation and adaptation.
The report identifies recurring trade-offs: productivity versus ecosystem services, affordable food versus sustainable production, farmer livelihoods versus regulation, and land for food versus land for carbon storage. Ignoring such tensions can result in maladaptation—an intervention that unintentionally increases climate vulnerability or shifts risk to another group or location.
Subsidies are the most common agricultural mitigation instrument in the policy inventory reviewed by the OECD, accounting for almost 70% of the measures. Their popularity does not establish their effectiveness; incentive design needs to be judged against measurable environmental outcomes, additional farmer adoption and value for public expenditure.
Project Evidence Should Feed Back into Policy
The guide treats field projects as potential testing grounds for wider policy, provided their monitoring systems are designed for learning. Evidence from a pilot can help governments decide whether to modify, scale or discontinue an intervention and can contribute to Nationally Determined Contributions and National Adaptation Plans.
This requires indicators to be selected before implementation, data to be comparable across locations and local stakeholders to participate in interpreting results. A project cannot inform national policy effectively when it reports activities in one format, environmental outcomes in another and no credible link between the two.
Policy Relevance
India operates agricultural, irrigation, watershed, rural-livelihood and climate-resilience programmes across widely different agroecological zones. The OECD guide offers a useful measurement discipline, rather than a ready-made assessment of those programmes.
Its application in India would require:
selecting locally relevant indicators instead of imposing an identical list across every crop and region;
recording pre-project baselines for soil, water, land use, farm income and climate exposure;
combining satellite monitoring with field and administrative data;
tracking both absolute emissions and emissions per unit of agricultural output;
separating adoption of a practice from its measured environmental effect; and
using comparable results to decide which pilots warrant state- or national-level expansion.
The principal institutional challenge is coordination. Agriculture, water, environment, rural-development and state agencies may fund different parts of the same landscape while using unrelated reporting systems. Shared outcome definitions could make it easier to see whether combined expenditure is improving farm resilience, natural resources and livelihoods, rather than producing parallel activity counts.
Follow the Full Report Here: Improving Environmental and Climate Outcomes in Agri-food Projects: A Guide for Development Practitioners