The ClimateShot Investor Coalition (CLIC) Agrifood Investment Connector (the Connector) Impact Assessment
Customer challenge
The Agrifood Investment Connector programme connects innovative sustainable agrifood SMEs with potential investment opportunities. The programme needed to help the SMEs to assess and communicate their positive climate and nature impacts to potential investors. Ricardo agri-environment specialists were commissioned to develop practical guidance and methods for impact assessment for use with SMEs in the programme.
The challenge was to ensure that the methods were credible, attuned to investor interests and feasible given the SME’s resources and expertise.
Ricardo's solution
Ricardo has been supporting the CLIC Agrifood Investment Connector programme (the Connector) to develop and implement climate mitigation and resilience impact assessments.
-
Developing impact assessment guidance: Ricardo engaged with the client team to critically review their draft climate impact assessment guidance, along with practical learnings from early programme cohorts. We recommended improvements, and then following input from the client, created a new suite of impact assessment guidance documents. The suite comprised general good practice guidance and technical method notes for key impact areas such as sustainable soil management, food loss and waste reduction, and sustainable livestock rearing. The technical notes provide guidance on a menu of publicly available tools, methods and data sources that can be used by the Connector’s own analysts to conduct credible assessments and can also be replicated by the SMEs in future.
-
Ongoing programme support: Ricardo has led on impact assessments for several SMEs in 4 programme cohorts (across Africa and Latin America). A key challenge for the impact assessments is the variety of the SMEs impactful activities and their access to data. Our team draw on the technical notes and their varied expertise in sustainable agrifood systems to conduct bespoke impact assessments, making the most of the SME data, supplementing with credible secondary sources where needed to create a complete picture.
Customer benefits
The client benefits from revised technical guidance on climate mitigation and adaptation impact assessment, which now forms the basis of their work with SMEs and feeds into wider development of impact assessment approaches with the Climate Shot Investor Coalition members.
Each SME receives a bespoke impact report - SMEs in several programme cohorts have successfully generated interest from potential investors and received feedback that investors appreciated their impact assessments.