Current research priorities may be distorting the way policymakers and investors make decisions.  A new report, Funding transformation but measuring yields: Results from a review of strategic interventions to enhance climate resilience and food security in agricultural systems in low- and middle-income countries published by Hesat2030 reviewed and mapped research for seven interventions areas with dual climate resilience and food security outcomes.  

The Hesat2030 report finds that while the evidence base for climate resilience and food security is growing, it remains highly focused on practices that can be measured easily and fit within short project cycles. Research is dominated by practices such as soil conservation and water management, while enabling measures that are more difficult to quantify and require longer time frames, like market access, information services, or post-harvest management areunder studied.  This creates an imbalance that favours the technical outcome of production rather than the systems that can determine whether those gains contribute to long-term resilience and food security. 

This imbalance matter. First, it limits the understanding of how institutional, informational, and market-based interventions contribute to long-term climate resilience and food security. Second, a larger evidence base for these broader interventions is essential to inform policies that address structural barriers and support sustainable transformation across agricultural and food systems, rather than focusing solely on farm-level practices. 

Building climate-resilient and food-secure agricultural systems in LMICs will depend less on discovering new practices and more on better measuring the systemic conditions under which existing ones succeed or fail. 

What needs to be done 

Based on these findings, the Hesat2030 report calls for a policy shift from project logic to a systems logic and the redesign and harmonisation of metrics.  

Policy must shift from a project logic to a systems logic  

Achieving climate resilience and food security will not depend on individual practices but rather on system-level resilience. Interventions therefore need to be coordinated across multiple domains, such as production, post-harvest, and markets, rather than confined to single technologies or sectors.  

To date, much of the focus of agricultural development funding has been on innovations related to production. Yet system-level change will not happen by focusing only on production. It is necessary to measure and invest in interventions that offer the enabling conditions that determine whether short term productivity translates into sustained resilience. A systems approach also enables a coordinated approach to develop and implement (bundling) multiple interventions. For example, this could include implementing agroecological practices on the field, providing advisory services to farmers and updating government regulations to enable the use of biopesticides.  

Until the evidence base reflects these interdependencies, policy and investment decisions will continue to rest on partial and potentially misleading pictures of what makes food systems resilient. 

The redesign and harmonisation of metrics 

Much of the existing research remains concentrated on short-term outcomes such as income, yield, and productivity. Although these outcomes are important, they provide limited insight into whether current practices lead to long-term food security and climate resilience. They also do not address negative coping strategies, such as overcropping or the sale of livestock, that can be detrimental to overall resilience and well-being. 

To inform policy, research should track a common set of indicators that allow capture both immediate outcomes and longer-term effect. This could include linking yields and incomes to adaptive capacity, equity, and sustained food access. Harmonised measurement is also needed to generate policy-relevant evidence at scale. While most studies focus on farm or household level outcomes, donor frameworks need evidence that scales. This calls for improving the comparability and aggregation of results across existing studies through the consistent use of indicators and metrics that allow findings from different contexts to be linked and synthesised. 

In effect, the system is funding transformation but measuring yields. 

Unpacking the research results 

Despite extensive research on food security and on climate resilience, these fields are often examined in isolation with one body of research focused on improving productivity and the other on managing climate risks. This division has left a critical blind spot in understanding how the same agricultural practices can target both food security and climate resilience. 

The Hesat2030 report provides the first of its kind evidence review and mapping of research that targets both climate resilience and food security outcomes. This was achieved by systematically gathering and synthesising the evidence on seven widely discussed agricultural interventions identified by the IPCC’s Special Report on Climate Change and Land as the most common strategies promoted to help smallholder farmers adapt to climate risks while improving food security.  

The evidence review combined both a machine learning model and full text screening to prioritise relevant studies written in English since 2008. From an initial retrieval of 28,392 records, findings from 127 studies were synthesised narratively with visualisations to show evidence clusters and knowledge gaps. Because studies were included only when both climate resilience and food security outcomes were reported, the review does not represent the wider body of research on single outcomes. 

Key findings from the seven interventions 

1. Soil conservation has the largest and most detailed body of research among the interventions (31% of studies), with studies frequently linking soil health, yield stability, and income primarily through agronomic pathways. 

2. Improved water management appears as the second most frequently studied intervention in the evidence base (25% of studies), reflecting the central research interest in water’s role in sustaining productivity and resilience across low- and middle-income countries. Studies primarily examined irrigation efficiency and yield reliability, with limited attention to system-wide aspects such as watershed trade-offs. 

3. Crop diversification is studied across multiple scales from field to subnational levels, yet most evaluations still focus on biophysical and economic outcomes , showing that its potential as a broader livelihood and resilience strategy remains underexplored. It appeared in 24% of the studies. 

4. Although agroforestry features prominently in global policy debates, relatively few studies measure both climate-resilience and food-security outcomes together, leaving its dual-outcome evidence base limited. 

5. Access to climate information and extension services are covered by more studies than anticipated (7% of studies), often capturing perception-based and adaptive capacity outcomes. It is one of the few interventions where resilience is empirically measured through decision-making and coping strategies rather than through biophysical stability alone.  

6. Improved market access is among the least examined interventions linking food security and climate resilience (4% of studies), with most existing studies reporting income-related outcomes and few connecting them to household-level food-security or resilience indicators.  

7. Post-harvest management and storage is the least represented intervention in the evidence base with only two studies captured in the analysed subset (1% of studies). The lack of dual-outcome studies makes this gap particularly significant, as a strategy widely emphasised in global policy remains largely untested in the empirical evidence base.  

Next steps  

The Hesat2030 report shows that while research on food and agricultural interventions linking climate resilience and food security in low- and middle-income countries has grown substantially over the past decade, it remains biased toward a narrow subset of interventions and outcomes. This results in an incomplete and imbalanced evidence landscape: it overrepresents what is visible and easily measured at the farm level and underrepresents the enablingsystems that underpin long-term agrifood system.  

Research funders, policymakers, and practitioners should align around a more systemic and long-term perspective so that the growing body of evidence can move from documenting isolated successes to guiding coherent strategies that stabilise food systems and livelihoods under accelerating climate change.