IRRI Launches SuRE Project Targeting 20% Rice Yield Gains for Climate-Vulnerable Farmers

The International Rice Research Institute has launched the Sustainable Rice Ecosystems Project in partnership with the Philippines' Department of Agriculture, a three-year initiative targeting a 20 percent increase in rice yields and at least a 30 percent increase in smallholder incomes across climate-vulnerable rice farming communities. The project begins its first year working with farming communities in Tarlac, Iloilo and Camarines Sur, addressing challenges from droughts, floods, typhoons and saltwater intrusion. SuRE is funded by the Department of Agriculture's National Rice Program through its Bureau of Agricultural Research.

 

Why Bundled, Site-Specific Technology Packages Differ From Past Approaches

 

The project's central design choice is developing what it calls climate-smart packages of technologies, or POTs, tailored to specific local conditions rather than promoting a single, universal solution across all farming communities. These packages may combine stress-tolerant rice varieties, improved crop and water management practices, diversified farming systems, community-based seed systems, climate information services, and risk-management mechanisms such as crop insurance, with the specific combination varying by location depending on local climate risks, available resources and livelihood needs.

That approach directly acknowledges a limitation common in agricultural climate adaptation programmes: a technology that performs well in one region's soil, water access and climate risk profile may perform poorly in another, meaning a single standardised intervention rolled out uniformly often underperforms relative to solutions genuinely adapted to local conditions. By working with farmers to co-design which combination of technologies fits their specific circumstances, rather than distributing a predetermined package, the project aims to increase the likelihood that farmers actually adopt and sustain the practices introduced, since interventions genuinely matched to local needs are more likely to deliver visible benefits that encourage continued use.

 

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Why the Project Explicitly Targets a Scaling Gap

 

SuRE builds directly on the Department of Agriculture's existing Adaptation and Mitigation Initiative in Agriculture programme, which has already established hundreds of climate-resilient agriculture learning sites across the Philippines. The project's own framing is notably candid about that programme's limitations, acknowledging that while AMIA villages have made significant progress in climate adaptation, many communities continue to face barriers in sustaining those gains and expanding successful practices beyond the initial pilot sites where they were first introduced.

That gap, between demonstrating a successful climate adaptation practice at a pilot site and actually scaling it into widespread, sustained adoption, is a recurring challenge across development and climate adaptation programmes generally, since a technology that works well under close technical supervision at a demonstration site does not automatically translate into successful independent adoption once that support is withdrawn. SuRE positions itself explicitly as bridging that gap by strengthening local capacities, validating technologies under genuine farm conditions rather than only controlled pilot conditions, and building concrete pathways for scaling successful innovations to a wider set of communities.

 

How the CS-MAP Tool's Equity Lens Changes Adaptation Planning

 

The project will introduce village-level climate risk mapping using IRRI's Climate-Smart Mapping and Adaptation Planning approach, integrated specifically with a social equity lens intended to ensure women, youth, tenant farmers and other vulnerable groups have a voice in adaptation planning decisions. That integration matters because climate adaptation planning processes have historically risked reflecting the priorities of the most visible or well-resourced farmers within a community, potentially overlooking the specific vulnerabilities facing tenant farmers who lack land ownership, women who may have different access to resources and decision-making authority, or younger farmers with different long-term stakes in the community's agricultural future.

Building an explicit equity lens into the risk mapping and planning process is designed to surface those differentiated vulnerabilities and ensure the resulting interventions address the full range of needs within a community rather than defaulting to the priorities of its most dominant voices, a distinction that could meaningfully affect whether the project's benefits are distributed broadly or concentrated among farmers who were already relatively better positioned before the intervention began.

 

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Why Institutional Coordination Is Framed as the Core Challenge

 

IRRI Deputy Director General Junel Soriano framed the project's fundamental challenge as institutional coordination rather than technology development alone, noting that farmers need not only technologies but also access to climate information, irrigation services, quality seeds, extension support, financing, crop insurance and enabling local policies, services provided by different institutions each playing a distinct role. That framing positions SuRE's core value less in inventing new agricultural technologies and more in coordinating the delivery of services that already exist across multiple institutions but have historically reached farming communities in a fragmented, uncoordinated way.

Beyond technology validation, the project will support farmer groups through training, leadership development, entrepreneurship programmes and community-based seed systems, alongside generating policy recommendations and scaling roadmaps intended to help local governments and national agencies institutionalise successful approaches once the three-year project concludes. Whether SuRE's coordinated, equity-conscious approach succeeds in closing the scaling gap that has limited the reach of the existing AMIA programme, and whether the project reaches its targeted 20 percent yield and 30 percent income increases across its three pilot provinces, will determine how effectively this model can be extended to other climate-vulnerable rice farming communities across the Philippines once the initial implementation period ends.

 

Source: The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)