Publication: Regenerative Agriculture in Practice: A Review
Loading...
Date
2024-09-24
ISSN
Published
2024-09-24
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Regenerative agriculture, a farming approach that focuses on soil health and ecosystems, has recently received considerable attention, particularly as an essential element of sustainable agriculture in the context of climate change. This paper reviews quantitative evidence of regenerative agriculture’s impact on productivity, resilience, and climate change mitigation—through carbon sequestration in soil. The effectiveness of regenerative agriculture depends on local climate conditions and existing practices. In addition, large-scale adoption of regenerative agriculture faces multiple challenges, such as the trade-off between short-term loss and long-term gains, smallholder farmer profitability, and other common market failures in agriculture. These challenges are especially salient in African agriculture. However, payments for ecosystem services, though yet to be carefully designed, can potentially incentivize farmers to adopt regenerative agriculture and create an additional source of income. Finally, further empirical evidence on the causal impacts of regenerative agriculture is needed to support policy design and recommendations. The paper concludes with open questions on regenerative agriculture for future study.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Dabalen, Andrew; Goyal, Aparajita; Song, Ruozi. 2024. Regenerative Agriculture in Practice: A Review. Policy Research Working Paper; 10919. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42192 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Geopolitics and the World Trading System(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23)Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.Publication Chinese Imports and Industrialization in Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-12)The rise of China in the global economy has been linked with negative impacts on employment across many high- and middle-income countries. However, evidence for African countries is limited. This paper investigates the causal relationship between Chinese imports and manufacturing employment in Ethiopia. Imports may harm domestic firms through a revenue effect (lower market shares) or benefit them, indirectly if competition spurs innovation or directly through access to better quality or cheaper inputs. The analysis shows that a one unit increase in import penetration leads to a 15.2 percent increase in industry employment. The inputs effect is disentangled from the other two effects by decomposing total Chinese imports by their end-use category using input-output tables. The evidence shows that imported intermediate inputs are driving the employment gains. The findings are consistent with the idea that employment gains are a result of productivity gains and increases in capacity utilization. These employment gains appear to benefit large firms and labor-intensive industries disproportionately.Publication VAT Exemptions, Embedded Tax, and Unintended Consequences(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-15)The value-added tax (VAT) has proved to be a highly effective tool at raising revenue in developed and developing countries alike. However, the effective operation of the VAT breaks down in the presence of exemptions. Unlike zero rates, exemptions deny input tax credits, thereby increasing production costs and resulting in VAT being embedded within the prices of goods and services. This paper develops a VAT model based on input-output table and household budget survey data for 29 European countries to examine the effects of VAT exemptions on final prices and to assess the merits of their use. Simulation results show that exemptions suffer from the same targeting problems as reduced VAT rates, but, in addition, they are non-transparent and have unpredictable and counterproductive indirect effects. These effects are in addition to the well-known distortionary impact of exemptions on production decisions, and their creation of incentives to self-supply. The paper concludes that the use of exemptions should be limited to addressing pragmatic concerns, such as the disproportionate compliance costs of small businesses and the practical difficulty in taxing margin-based financial services.Publication Disentangling the Key Economic Channels through Which Infrastructure Affects Jobs(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-03)This paper takes stock of the literature on infrastructure and jobs published since the early 2000s, using a conceptual framework to identify the key channels through which different types of infrastructure impact jobs. Where relevant, it highlights the different approaches and findings in the cases of energy, digital, and transport infrastructure. Overall, the literature review provides strong evidence of infrastructure’s positive impact on employment, particularly for women. In the case of electricity, this impact arises from freeing time that would otherwise be spent on household tasks. Similarly, digital infrastructure, particularly mobile phone coverage, has demonstrated positive labor market effects, often driven by private sector investments rather than large public expenditures, which are typically required for other large-scale infrastructure projects. The evidence on structural transformation is also positive, with some notable exceptions, such as studies that find no significant impact on structural transformation in rural India in the cases of electricity and roads. Even with better market connections, remote areas may continue to lack economic opportunities, due to the absence of agglomeration economies and complementary inputs such as human capital. Accordingly, reducing transport costs alone may not be sufficient to drive economic transformation in rural areas. The spatial dimension of transformation is particularly relevant for transport, both internationally—by enhancing trade integration—and within countries, where economic development tends to drive firms and jobs toward urban centers, benefitting from economies scale and network effects. Turning to organizational transformation, evidence on skill bias in developing countries is more mixed than in developed countries and may vary considerably by context. Further research, especially on the possible reasons explaining the differences between developed and developing economies, is needed.Publication Economic Consequences of Trade and Global Value Chain Integration(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2025-04-04)This paper introduces a new approach to measuring Global Value Chains (GVC), crucial for informed policy-making. It features a tripartite classification (backward, forward, and two-sided) covering trade and production data. The findings indicate that traditional trade-based GVC metrics significantly underestimate global GVC activity, especially in sectors like services and upstream manufacturing, and overstate risks in early trade liberalization stages. Additionally, conventional backward-forward classifications over-estimate backward linkages. The paper further applies these measures empirically to assess how GVC participation mediates the impact of demand shocks on domestic output, highlighting both the exposure and stabilizing potential of GVC integration. These new measures are comprehensively available on the World Bank’s WITS Platform, providing a key resource for GVC analysis.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Agriculture Production Potential of Groundwater Irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-29)Sub-Saharan Africa’s low agricultural productivity exacerbates rural poverty. An important investment, the sustainable use of groundwater for irrigation, has the potential to increase agricultural productivity, but the region has been much slower to adopt this irrigation method compared to other regions, despite abundant reserves. This study uses a simulation-driven approach to examine the benefits of sustainably utilizing groundwater for irrigation. By mapping data from 291,798 global agro-ecological zones to 8,099 groundwater grids, the study models the production gains from groundwater irrigation for rain-fed croplands. Simulation results indicate that groundwater access could increase output by 27.97 to 129.42 percent, contingent on crop and model conditions. This research facilitates the assessment of the transformative potential of groundwater irrigation and identifies areas in Sub-Saharan Africa where investments can yield significant returns without depleting the groundwater table.Publication Pathways to Prosperity in Rural Malawi(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-05-31)By most accounts, rural Malawi has lacked dynamism in the past decade. Growth has been mostly volatile, in large part due to unstable macroeconomic fundamentals evidenced by high inflation, fiscal deficits, and interest rates. When rapid economic growth has materialized, the gains have not always reached the poorest. Poverty remains high and the rural poor face significant challenges in consistently securing enough food. Several factors contribute to stubbornly high rural poverty. They include a low-productivity and non-diversified agriculture, macroeconomic and recurrent climatic shocks, limited non-farm opportunities and low returns to such activities, especially for the poor, and poor performance from some of the prominent safety net programs. The Report proposes complementary policy actions that offer a possible path for a more dynamic and prosperous rural economy. The key pillars of this comprise macroeconomic stability, increased productivity in agriculture, faster urbanization, better functioning safety nets, and more inclusive financial markets. Some recommendations call for a reorientation of existing programs such as the Malawi Farm Input Subsidy Program (FISP) and the Malawi Social Action Fund Public Works Program (MASAF-PWP). Others identify promising new areas of intervention, such as the introduction of digital IDs and biometric technologies to enhance the reach of mobile banking and deepen financial inclusion. Finally, and importantly, the report recommends the scaling up of investments on girls’ secondary education to curb early child marriage and early child bearing among adolescents. This will empower women at home and work and bend the trajectory of fertility rates in rural areas in order to boost human development and reduce poverty.Publication Social Dimensions of Climate Change : Equity and Vulnerability in a Warming World(World Bank, 2010)Climate change is widely acknowledged as foremost among the formidable challenges facing the international community in the 21st century. It poses challenges to fundamental elements of our understanding of appropriate goals for social and economic policy, such as the connection of prosperity, growth, equity, and sustainable development. This volume seeks to establish an agenda for research and action built on an enhanced understanding of the relationship between climate change and the key social dimensions of vulnerability, social justice, and equity. The volume is organized as follows. This introductory chapter first sets the scene by framing climate change as an issue of social justice at multiple levels, and by highlighting equity and vulnerability as the central organizing themes of an agenda on the social dimensions of climate change. Chapter two leads off with a review of existing theories and frameworks for understanding vulnerability, drawing out implications for pro-poor climate policy. Understanding the multilayered causal structure of vulnerability then can assist in identifying entry points for pro-poor climate policy at multiple levels. Building on such analytical approaches, chapters three and four, respectively, consider the implications of climate change for armed conflict and for migration. Those chapters are followed by a discussion of two of the most important social cleavages that characterize distinct forms of vulnerability to climate change and climate action: gender (chapter five) and ethnicity or indigenous identity (chapter six), in the latter case, focusing on the role of indigenous knowledge in crafting climate response measures in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Chapter seven highlights the important mediating role of local institutions in achieving more equitable, pro-poor outcomes from efforts to support adaptation to climate change. Chapter eight examines the implications of climate change for agrarian societies living in dry-land areas of the developing world, and chapter nine does the same for those living in urban centers. Chapter ten considers the role of social policy instruments in supporting pro-poor adaptation to climate change; and it argues for a focus on 'no-regrets' options that integrate adaptation with existing development approaches, albeit with modifications to take better account of the ways in which climate variables interact with other drivers of vulnerability. Finally, chapter eleven turns to the implications of climate policy and action for forest areas and forest people.Publication Sub-Saharan Africa - Managing Land in a Changing Climate : An Operational Perspective for Sub-Saharan Africa(World Bank, 2010-05-01)Livelihoods, food security, and development processes in Sub-Saharan Africa are highly dependent on land management practices to generate natural ecosystem goods and services. Out of a total population of about 717 million people, almost 60 percent depend for their livelihood on agriculture, hunting, fishing, or forestry. However, unsustainable land management already is leading to large-scale land degradation trends, which pose a threat to food security and poverty alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change threatens to exacerbate and add to the existing vulnerabilities. Evidence has shown that the number of people affected by climate variability, through floods and droughts, is already increasing. Much-needed increases in agricultural production have, as a result, been unrealized. These outcomes place smallholder farmers, who depend largely on rainfed agriculture, in highly vulnerable circumstances under climate-change predictions. The objective of this work is to improve practical knowledge resources for Sub-Saharan African countries, regional institutions, and development practitioners at the World Bank and other partner institutions to help them make informed decisions about: (i) the risks posed by climate variability and change to land-resource-dependent livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa; and (ii) Sustainable Land and Water Management (SLWM) approaches and practices that are best suited for meeting development objectives while also addressing the challenge posed by climate-change adaptation and mitigation.Publication Bolivia - Country Note on Climate Change Aspects in Agriculture(Washington, DC, 2009-12)This country note briefly summarizes information relevant to both climate change and agriculture in Bolivia, with focus on policy developments (including action plans and programs) and institutional make-up. Like most countries in Latin America, Bolivia has submitted one national communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with a second one under preparation. Land use change and forestry, coupled with agriculture, are by far the largest contributors to green house gas (GHG) emissions in the country. The emission reduction potential of the sector is large, but not sufficiently explored. Bolivia counts with only two registered Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects, none of which is in the agricultural sector. Agriculture is highly vulnerable to climate variability and weather extremes and around a third of the population derives their livelihood from agricultural production. A greater emphasis on adaptation strategies, in particular those related to water harvest and sustainable land management, as well as developing and applying adequate insurance mechanisms can be placed for better management of public resources in light of natural disasters in the agriculture sector.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication The Power of Survey Design : A User's Guide for Managing Surveys, Interpreting Results, and Influencing Respondents(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006)The vast majority of data used for economic research, analysis, and policy design comes from surveys-surveys of households, firms, schools, hospitals, and market participants, and, the accuracy of the estimate will depend on how well the survey is done. This innovative book is both a 'how-to' go about carrying out high-quality surveys, especially in the challenging environment of developing countries, and a 'user's guide' for anyone who uses statistical data. Reading this book will provide data users with a wealth of insight into what kinds of problems, or biases to look for in different data sources, based on the underlying survey approaches that were used to generate the data. In that sense the book is an invaluable 'skeptics guide to data'. Yet, the broad storyline of the book is something that should be absorbed by statistical data users. The book will teach and show how difficult it often is to obtain reliable estimates of important social and economic facts, and, therefore encourages you to approach all estimates with sensible caution.Publication Supporting Youth at Risk(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008)The World Bank has produced this policy Toolkit in response to a growing demand from our government clients and partners for advice on how to create and implement effective policies for at-risk youth. The author has highlighted 22 policies (six core policies, nine promising policies, and seven general policies) that have been effective in addressing the following five key risk areas for young people around the world: (i) youth unemployment, underemployment, and lack of formal sector employment; (ii) early school leaving; (iii) risky sexual behavior leading to early childbearing and HIV/AIDS; (iv) crime and violence; and (v) substance abuse. The objective of this Toolkit is to serve as a practical guide for policy makers in middle-income countries as well as professionals working within the area of youth development on how to develop and implement an effective policy portfolio to foster healthy and positive youth development.Publication World Development Report 2019(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019)Work is constantly reshaped by technological progress. New ways of production are adopted, markets expand, and societies evolve. But some changes provoke more attention than others, in part due to the vast uncertainty involved in making predictions about the future. The 2019 World Development Report will study how the nature of work is changing as a result of advances in technology today. Technological progress disrupts existing systems. A new social contract is needed to smooth the transition and guard against rising inequality. Significant investments in human capital throughout a person’s lifecycle are vital to this effort. If workers are to stay competitive against machines they need to train or retool existing skills. A social protection system that includes a minimum basic level of protection for workers and citizens can complement new forms of employment. Improved private sector policies to encourage startup activity and competition can help countries compete in the digital age. Governments also need to ensure that firms pay their fair share of taxes, in part to fund this new social contract. The 2019 World Development Report presents an analysis of these issues based upon the available evidence.Publication Ten Steps to a Results-Based Monitoring and Evaluation System : A Handbook for Development Practitioners(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004)An effective state is essential to achieving socio-economic and sustainable development. With the advent of globalization, there are growing pressures on governments and organizations around the world to be more responsive to the demands of internal and external stakeholders for good governance, accountability and transparency, greater development effectiveness, and delivery of tangible results. Governments, parliaments, citizens, the private sector, Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), civil society, international organizations, and donors are among the stakeholders interested in better performance. As demands for greater accountability and real results have increased, there is an attendant need for enhanced results-based monitoring and evaluation of policies, programs, and projects. This handbook provides a comprehensive ten-step model that will help guide development practitioners through the process of designing and building a results-based monitoring and evaluation system. These steps begin with a 'readiness assessment' and take the practitioner through the design, management, and importantly, the sustainability of such systems. The handbook describes each step in detail, the tasks needed to complete each one, and the tools available to help along the way.Publication Zimbabwe(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-03-01)This report presents an assessment of Zimbabwe’s agriculture sector disaster risk and management capacity. The findings indicate that Zimbabwe is highly exposed to agricultural risks and has limited capacity to manage risk at various levels. The report shows that disaster-related shocks along Zimbabwe’s agricultural supply chains directly translate to volatility in agricultural GDP. Such shocks have a substantial impact on economic growth, food security, and fiscal balance. When catastrophic disasters occur, the economy absorbs the shocks, without benefiting from any instruments that transfer the risk to markets and coping ability. The increasing prevalence of ‘shock recovery-shock’ cycles impairs Zimbabwe’s ability to plan and pursue a sustainable development path. The findings presented here confirm that it is highly pertinent for Zimbabwe to strengthen the capacity to manage risk at various levels, from the smallholder farmer, to other participants along the supply chain, to consumers (who require a reliable, safe food supply), and ultimately to the government to manage natural disasters. The assessment provides the following evidence on sources of risks and plausible risk management solutions. It is our hope that the report contributes to action by the Government of Zimbabwe to adopt a proactive and integrated risk management strategy appropriate to the current structure of the agricultural sector.