This paper aims to provide insights into the interplay between food security outcomes and climatic variables, and provides policy implications for targeted interventions to improve the productivity and the resilience of smallholder agriculture in Zambia in the face of climate change.

It analyses how a set of widely promoted agricultural practices, including reduced tillage, crop rotations, legume intercropping as well as the use of modern inputs, affect crop yields and their resilience (i.e. probability of disastrously low yields) in Zambia using panel data from the Rural Incomes and Livelihoods Surveys (RILS). The RILS data are merged with a novel set of climatic variables based on geo-referenced historical rainfall and temperature data to understand whether and how the effects of the practices analyzed here change with climatic conditions.