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Innovative solutions are needed to tackle climate change, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the agricultural sector, because of its dual role as both a ‘victim’and a ‘villain’–being one of the most vulnerable sectors to the impacts of climate change, while contributing up to a third of human-induced carbon emissions (Lipper et al., 2018; IPCC, 2019, 2022). Agricultural innovation is not new, but built on thousands of years of farmer experience and documented through many decades of academic scholarship (Richards, 1985; Chambers et al., 1989; van der Veen, 2010).

On the face of it, innovation is thus an obvious and key component for any action or strategy to support adaptation to climate change in the agricultural sector, drawing on existing, locally developed capacities, and ultimately employing human ingenuity to tackle uncertain and variable climates. As such, it has become a truism to say that we need …