Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) is recognized as a model public works safety net program, which provides food and cash payments to households suffering from food insecurity in return for labor that builds public infrastructure. In addition to the target benefits of food security and infrastructure development, PSNP’s participatory water-shed management interventions, while not their primary objective, are already delivering climate-change mitigation benefits by sequestering carbon in soils and biomass and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the agricultural, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) sector. New opportunities for support from dedicated climate finance channels could be opened up by quantifying the climate change mitigation benefits (a.k.a. carbon benefits) generated by PSNP activities.

This report summarizes the potential of PSNP's food security program to contribute to climate change mitigation, and the policy actions required to access international climate finance to support this program.