Validation of the Solidaridad Climate Smart Index

Solidaridad is an international network organization with partners all over the world that works to create sustainable supply chains from the producer to the consumer. Solidaridad developed and tested the Climate Smart Index (CSI) across five projects with about 50,000 farmers. The CSI tool aims to track the progress of farmers toward climate adaptation. It translates the climate risk and resilience concept of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change into a pragmatic scoring system. A key weakness of the tool was the lack of a standardized methodology and scoring system, which created too much ‘expert bias’ in the scoring results. In order to make it scalable and widely adoptable, UNIQUE provided a scientific validation of the conceptual CSI approach to measure adaptation and proposed a standardized methodological framework for the CSI.