HomeAbstract of 6th-ccgconfIntegrating the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework and Climate-smart Agriculture to Enhance Smallholder Farmers’ Climate Resilience in South Africa: a Review

Integrating the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework and Climate-smart Agriculture to Enhance Smallholder Farmers’ Climate Resilience in South Africa: a Review

  • Nov 25, 2025
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Abstract Book of the 6th World Conference on Climate Change and Global Warming

Year: 2025

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Integrating the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework and Climate-smart Agriculture to Enhance Smallholder Farmers’ Climate Resilience in South Africa: a Review

Anathi Sohuma-Mdaka, Prof Mj Ngoepe-Ntsoane

ABSTRACT:

Smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face increasing livelihood insecurity due to erratic rainfall, recurrent droughts, land degradation, and rising temperatures. While Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) offers practices to enhance productivity, adaptation, and mitigation, adoption remains limited by financial, institutional, and information barriers. Concurrently, the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) provides a lens for understanding how human, social, natural, physical, and financial assets shape resilience, but it is rarely applied in conjunction with CSA. This results in fragmented interventions that fail to address both technical and socio-economic realities. This study reviews theoretical and empirical literature to propose an integrated CSA–SLF framework for strengthening the climate resilience of smallholder vegetable farmers in South Africa. This framework specifically targets the enhancement of resilience among smallholder vegetable farmers in South Africa by bridging technical and socio-economic dimensions of climate resilience. Using a desk-based conceptual synthesis, the study highlights the role of agricultural extension, market access, and capacity building as mediating pathways linking CSA practices and livelihood assets to adaptive, absorptive, and transformative capacities. The study highlights the limitations of current CSA approaches that emphasise technical adoption, demonstrates how integration with the SLF enriches resilience-building, and advances a framework to guide policy and practice. Future research is encouraged to implement and assess this framework in different contexts to determine its effectiveness in promoting sustainable food systems and enduring resilience.

Keywords: Adaptive Capacity, Agricultural Extension, Food Security, Livelihood Assets, Market Access