The climate crisis is driving loss and damage, hunger and rising vulnerabilities – especially where it intersects with conflicts and other disasters, undermining progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Extreme weather events and slow-onset climate impacts are increasing in frequency and severity, hitting hardest in communities already on the brink. To respond effectively, we must not only scale up context-specific climate actions, but also strengthen the systems that generate, share, and apply knowledge. Building inclusive, resilient, and sustainable agrifood systems requires learning from what works, adapting to changing conditions, and ensuring that local and global knowledge informs decision-making at every level. 

Transforming agrifood systems is a key solution to today’s interconnected challenges, and a vital entry point for resilience to climate shocks and stresses. Knowledge Management (KM) plays a critical role in this transformation by facilitating learning across contexts, capturing good and promising practices, and enabling evidence-based scaling of climate solutions. 

What is the Climate Action Good Practice Challenge? 

FAO’s Office of Emergencies and Resilience launched the Good Practice Challenge to identify and document good practices, experiences, and lessons learned from the implementation of climate action solutions by FAO in — or adapted to — food crisis and fragile contexts between 2020 and 2025. 

Objective: The initiative aims to share and strengthen collective knowledge and learning to scale up climate action across FAO’s emergency and resilience portfolio. It also seeks to leverage existing experience and evidence to reinforce FAO’s leadership and strategic positioning on climate action in crisis and fragile settings. By embedding KM principles into the initiative, the Challenge fosters a culture of learning and adaptation—ensuring that knowledge is not only captured but actively used to inform programming, policy, and partnerships. 

Selection: The selection process was carried out from both a knowledge management and a technical review perspective, following established good practice criteria developed by KORE and tailored to this technical area of work. Specific attention and weight were attributed to results and impacts, replicability and scalability potential, and sustainability factors. This KM-informed approach ensures that selected practices are not only technically sound but also captured from a KM perspective, highlighting its transferability, and adaptability across diverse contexts. 

Results: A total of 32 practices from 19 countries and 1 multi-country initiative passed the selection as good or promising practices. Specifically, among the 22 good practices — i.e. practices that have been proven to work effectively and efficiently, and produced positive sustainable results, and/or that has been tested and validated through various iterations and replications and is therefore recommended as a model for greater adoption —  8 of them consider forcibly displaced populations and propose durable solutions, and 6 have either a strong Conflict Peace Security (CPS) nexus approach or integrate relevant CPS components. These practices will be made accessible through FAO’s Office of Emergencies and Resilience knowledge internal and external platforms enabling peer exchange, cross-context learning, and continuous improvement. 

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