From Satellites to Soil: Integrating Satellite and Household Survey Data to Assess the Impacts of Adaptations on Smallholder Farmers’ Climate Resilience

Despite feeding the majority of the global population, small (<2 ha) farmers are among the poorest and disproportionately vulnerable to climate changes. Their ability to improve yields amid increasingly severe and frequent climate shocks will largely determine the success of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to eliminate poverty and hunger. Because smallholder farmers play a central role in efforts to achieve global food security, many governmental and private institutions have influenced smallholders’ on-farm management practices through interventions. However, interventions led by different institutions have pushed communities of smallholders to adopt divergent adaptation strategies: Some communities have taken proactive measures by diversifying their crop rotations or implementing tree-based systems as natural climate solutions, while others have primarily used reactive measures, implementing adaptations that were directly informed by their recent experiences with extreme weather events (e.g., altering sow and harvest dates to avoid a period of extreme heat). Despite the deadly consequences of food shortages in smallholder communities, very little research has quantified the impact of specific adaptations on their sensitivity to inter-annual climate variability. Fortunately, the recent influx of satellite sensors has enabled us to remotely monitor changes in smallholder field-level cultivation practices and tree-based systems, and with high performance computing, we can scale these analyses across landscapes. Here, we integrated administrative yield data, multi-source satellite and weather data, and household and field survey data across India, Nepal, and Bangladesh in mixed-effect models to answer: Where, and how have smallholder communities adapted their cultivation practices? And, how have these adaptations impacted their resilience to weather shocks? The results of these findings were contextualized using household survey data of 2,000 smallholder farmers to understand the drivers of farmers’ decisions and their perspectives on climate-induced adaptations. Our findings can inform future interventions in the region, and the algorithms will be directly transferable to other regions of smallholder agriculture where farmers adopt distinct adaptations and experience other climate threats.