Agriculture is central to food security1, livelihoods, and economic development, across the world but more importantly in developing countries. Agriculture is largely characterized by rural production systems and support livelihoods for 86% of the world’s rural population. It is also a key sector for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Many of the world’s 500 million small-scale producers live in poverty, and face challenges such as disruptions from climate change, increasing demand for food from growing populations, and degrading agroecological landscapes and resources. Since these small-scale producers produce much of the planet’s food, they need to be put at the forefront of
reconfiguring our food systems2. While many actions within the agriculture sector are interlinked, the impacts are affected by actions in many other GCF identified sectors, such as forest and land use, water, energy, ecosystem, and health. Agriculture and food security support employment across many sectors and can exacerbate or mitigate risks and hazards. The COVID-19 pandemic may add between 83 and 132 million people to the total number of already undernourished people in the world2, reinforcing the importance of agriculture and its linkages to nutrition, migration, stability, and even national security.

This sectoral guidance shares the programming direction, evidence-based knowledge, best practices, and lessons learned to guide proposal development for the Green Climate Fund (GCF) under its first replenishment period 2020-2023. These investments aim to transform agriculture and food systems while meeting country priorities. This sectoral guidance also provides strategic insights into where GCF’s funded activities can have the greatest impact across result areas related to agriculture and informs countries and accredited entities in developing funding proposals that meet the GCF’s investment criteria.

This guidance mainly supports the GCF result areas of most vulnerable people and communities;
health, food and water security; and forest and land use. It also links to ecosystem and ecosystem
services, resilient infrastructures, and energy access and generation. At the same time, GCF is
preparing sectoral guides across its other results areas3 and recognizes the importance of a
complementary approach. The table below shows the cross-sectoral issues addressed within this
guidance and identifies cross-sectoral issues found in other sector guides.This guide seeks to provide an overview of country needs and evidence-based programming experiences in the agriculture and food security (agriculture) sector. It aims to guide proposal development in the sector for the GCF in line with its investment criteria during its first replenishment period 2020-2023.

This sector guide was released for consultation in November 2020 and the consultation was open until the end of January 2021 to provide sufficient time for stakeholder to provide inputs. Consultation was open to the Board, advisers, observers, NDAs, Direct and International Access Entities, civil society, private sector representatives, partner institutions and sector experts. The Secretariat received more than 660 specific comments and feedback on this draft. This consultation version 1 is an updated version of the Guide that incorporates all comments and feedback received.

The sectoral guides will be submitted to the GCF Board for its consideration in 2022. In the meantime, GCF remains open to further comments on this draft. For further inquiries please contact via: sectoralguides [at] gcfund.org (sectoralguides[at]gcfund[dot]org)