- Convenors:
-
Agatha Ogbe
(Opolo Global Innovation Limited, Lagos State, Nigeria)
Oghenetega Ogbe (National Root Crops Research Institute Umudike)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Climate justice, just transitions & environmental futures
Short Abstract
This panel explores how smallholder farmers navigate climate uncertainty through emerging digital tools, networks and new forms of knowledge. It examines how digital innovation reshapes power, agency, knowledge, and climate adaptation among smallholder agriculture
Description
Smallholder farmers form the backbone of global food systems and stand on the frontline of the climate crisis, confronting intensifying droughts, floods, and ecosystem disruptions that threaten food security and rural livelihoods. As the pressure to adapt grows, digital technologies are increasingly promoted as solutions for enhancing resilience and adaptation: from mobile-based weather forecasts apps and digital finance to precision agriculture and data-driven decision platforms. This panel examines how digitalization is transforming the landscape of how smallholder adapt, organise, and imagine their futures amid global uncertainty. The panel situates digital resilience not merely as the capacity to use technology but as a relational process, one shaped by inequalities in data-ownership, connectivity, and decision-making power. It also explores how digital technologies intersect with longstanding structural challenges in rural economies, such as land tenure security, gendered labour divisions, and unequal access to information. It asks whether digital innovations genuinely expand adaptive capacities or offers opportunities for locally grounded-innovation and empowerment. This panel asks: how are digital infrastructures reshaping farmers’ practices of climate adaptation? Do digital interventions enable equitable resilience, or reproduce existing inequalities and dependencies? What new forms of agency and knowledge are emerging as smallholders engage with digital tools? Who controls agricultural data, and how does this affect equity in adaptation planning? Can digital resilience enable more democratic and sustainable models of rural development? Bringing together diverse case studies and critical perspectives, the panel will advance debates on what a just and inclusive digital future for rural communities might look like.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Smallholder farmers in Nigeria faces uncertainty due to climate change. Farmers have resorted to using digital climate tools to cope with the climate challenges. Looking at the farmers’ lived experiences, the paper contributes to wider debates and calls for an all inclusive adaptation approach.
Paper long abstract
Smallholder farmers in Nigeria faces so much uncertainty due to climate change. There has been erratic rainfall, extreme heat, flood and intense drought, this has led to the disruption of planting seasons, reduction in yield and pressure on rural livelihood. In order to adapt to these challenges, farmers have resorted to digital climate tools like mobile weather forecast from the Nigerian meteriogical Agency (Nimet), agritech applications, e-extension services and digital farmers network. This paper aims to find out how smallholder farmers in Nigeria use these digital tools to cope with climate change, how the farmers moved from the traditional method to digital platform and how this shift is affecting the relationship between the farmers, government, the agency and tech companies.
The study revealed an asymmetrical finding whereby, to some farmers digital tools creates an opportunity for accessing climate information, knowledge sharing and ability to respond to risk and uncertainty. While for others there might be challenges of poor connectivity, poor educational background, language barrier, gender norms and control of data. All these might create some level of exclusion
From policy analysis, current literature and real-life experiences of farmers in Nigeria, this paper reveals that digital climate tools can be a solution to some farmers and a constrain to other farmers. This study focusses on farmers experiences and lays more emphasis on the on-going debate, asserting that the future of Nigeria agriculture should use a more inclusive approach whereby the technology used should serve the people concerned and not vice versa.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how digital agricultural advisory services shape smallholder climate adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on data ownership, power relations, and farmer agency. It asks whether digital advice enhances resilience or reinforces dependency.
Paper long abstract
Digital agricultural advisory services—such as mobile weather forecasts, SMS-based agronomic guidance, and app-driven extension—are increasingly promoted as solutions for smallholder climate adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa. From an agricultural economics perspective, these tools promise to reduce information gaps and improve farm-level decision-making under climate uncertainty. Yet they also introduce new power dynamics around data control, knowledge production, and adaptation pathways.
This paper analyses how smallholder farmers engage with digital advisory services in climate-vulnerable regions. The study examines who accesses digital advice, how it is used, and whose knowledge is prioritised and how digital advisory services can support timely responses to climate variability—such as adjusting planting dates or input use.
Paper short abstract
Climate variability, weather data, and pest dynamics shape smallholder sweet potato adaptation in Nigeria. Using field data on whitefly populations and viral disease, it highlights how access to timely climate information mediates farmers’ adaptive capacity, vulnerability, and decision-making power.
Paper long abstract
Smallholder farmers are increasingly required to adapt to climate variability while operating under conditions of limited resources, asymmetric information, and environmental uncertainty. This paper examines how weather variability and data-driven knowledge shape climate adaptation in smallholder sweet potato production in southeastern Nigeria. Drawing on field-based data on whitefly populations, sweet potato virus disease incidence, and local weather parameters, the study demonstrates how temperature, humidity, and wind patterns directly influence pest pressure and yield vulnerability. The findings reveal that rising temperatures significantly increase whitefly populations, intensifying viral disease incidence and threatening smallholder livelihoods. While such climate–pest relationships are increasingly legible through meteorological data and agronomic monitoring, smallholder farmers often lack equitable access to timely, localized, and actionable climate information. This gap highlights how adaptation is not only a technical challenge but also a question of power, data access, and knowledge control. Situating the analysis within debates on digital agriculture and climate resilience, the paper argues that weather data, pest surveillance, and decision-support tools have the potential to enhance adaptive capacity, but only when embedded in locally grounded knowledge systems. Without inclusive digital infrastructures, climate data risks reinforcing dependency on external expertise rather than strengthening farmer agency. By foregrounding the lived realities of sweet potato farmers confronting climate-driven pest dynamics, the paper contributes to critical discussions on whether data-driven adaptation fosters equitable resilience or reproduces existing inequalities. Ultimately, it calls for more democratic approaches to digital climate services that centre smallholder knowledge, participation, and control in adaptation planning.
Paper short abstract
This study provides a critical assessment of the role of digital tools and artificial intelligence in smallholder farmers’ adaptation efforts under climate change uncertainty.
Paper long abstract
Climate change is intensifying uncertainty for smallholder and commercial farmers alike, disrupting rainfall patterns, increasing the frequency of extreme weather events, and undermining traditional agricultural knowledge systems that once guided planting, harvesting, and risk management decisions. In many developing regions, farmers face climate uncertainty alongside structural constraints such as limited access to extension services, markets, finance, and timely climate information, raising urgent questions about how digitalisation and artificial intelligence (AI) can support adaptive capacity and resilience. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic review of existing empirical literature assessing how digital tools and AI-enabled applications—including mobile-based climate advisories and early warning systems—support farmers’ decision-making under climate uncertainty. The objectives are to: examine how digital and AI-driven tools influence smallholder farmers’ climate-related decisions and adaptive practices, and identify the conditions under which these technologies enhance or constrain equitable adaptation outcomes. The review follows a systematic protocol, drawing on peer-reviewed journal articles across agriculture, development studies, climate science, and information systems. Preliminary findings suggest that digital and AI tools can improve short-term climate responsiveness—such as timing of planting and input use—but often fail to address deeper structural vulnerabilities without complementary institutional support. Evidence also indicates uneven access and benefits, with gender, literacy, connectivity, and affordability shaping who gains from digital climate solutions. The study is important because it moves beyond technological optimism to critically assess digitalisation as a development strategy, informing more inclusive, context-sensitive, and justice-oriented approaches to climate-smart agriculture in an era of accelerating climate-induced economic and non-economic loss and damage.