Global Climate Change Resilient And Smart Agriculture

This book provides essential insights into methods and practices of ‘Climate-smart Agriculture,’ which is driven by the principles of climate resilience and smart resource use in agricultural production. Climate-smart agriculture is a key policy instrument for achieving poverty eradication and a hunger-free world, as well as mitigating the effects of climate change. This book discusses in detail climate-smart agricultural technologies and practices that can reduce the vulnerability of agricultural systems, improve the livelihoods of farmers and other stakeholders, and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from crop production and livestock husbandry. The agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU) sector produces roughly 10–12 gigatons of CO2-equivalent per year; therefore, sustainable practices for agriculture and related land use hold immense potential to mitigate climate change. The potential impacts of climate variability and climate change on agriculture are extensively documented and articulated, especially with regard to global and national environmental agendas that call for innovation, transformation and climate-resilient advances in agriculture. As the book demonstrates, climate-smart agriculture offers an excellent tool for boosting agricultural output to feed the growing global population; for reducing greenhouse gases emissions from agriculture and other land use; and for protecting agricultural production systems from the impending dangers of climate change.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO license. The book uses an economic lens to identify the main features of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), its likely impact, and the challenges associated with its implementation. Drawing upon theory and concepts from agricultural development, institutional, and resource economics, this book expands and formalizes the conceptual foundations of CSA. Focusing on the adaptation/resilience dimension of CSA, the text embraces a mixture of conceptual analyses, including theory, empirical and policy analysis, and case studies, to look at adaptation and resilience through three possible avenues: ex-ante reduction of vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity, and ex-post risk coping. The book is divided into three sections. The first section provides conceptual framing, giving an overview of the CSA concept and grounding it in core economic principles. The second section is devoted to a set of case studies illustrating the economic basis of CSA in terms of reducing vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity and ex-post risk coping. The final section addresses policy issues related to climate change. Providing information on this new and important field in an approachable way, this book helps make sense of CSA and fills intellectual and policy gaps by defining the concept and placing it within an economic decision-making framework. This book will be of interest to agricultural, environmental, and natural resource economists, development economists, and scholars of development studies, climate change, and agriculture. It will also appeal to policy-makers, development practitioners, and members of governmental and non-governmental organizations interested in agriculture, food security and climate change.

Two of the greatest current challenges are climate change (and variability) and food security. Feeding nine billion people by 2050 will require major efforts aimed at climate change adaptation and mitigation. One approach to agriculture has recently been captured by the widely adopted term of "Climate Smart Agriculture" (CSA). This book not only explains what this entails, but also presents practical on-the-ground studies of practices and innovations in agriculture across a broader spectrum, including agroecology and conservation agriculture, in less developed countries. It is shown that CSA is not a completely new science and a number of its recommended technologies have been used for some time by local farmers all over the world. What is relevant and new is ‘the approach’ to exploit their adaptation and mitigation potential. However, a major limitation is the lack of evidence-based knowledge that is necessary for policy makers to prepare strategies for adaptation and mitigation. This book assembles knowledge of CSA, agroecology and conservation agriculture, and perspectives from different regions of the world, to build resilient food systems. The first part analyzes the concept, opportunities and challenges, and provides a global perspective, drawing particularly on studies from Africa and Asia. The second part of the book showcases results from various studies linked to soil, water and crop management measures from an ongoing program in India as well as experiences from other regions. The third section assesses the needs for an enabling policy environment, mainstreaming gender and sime final recommendations for up-scaling and/or out-scaling innovations.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO license. The book uses an economic lens to identify the main features of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), its likely impact, and the challenges associated with its implementation. Drawing upon theory and concepts from agricultural development, institutional, and resource economics, this book expands and formalizes the conceptual foundations of CSA. Focusing on the adaptation/resilience dimension of CSA, the text embraces a mixture of conceptual analyses, including theory, empirical and policy analysis, and case studies, to look at adaptation and resilience through three possible avenues: ex-ante reduction of vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity, and ex-post risk coping. The book is divided into three sections. The first section provides conceptual framing, giving an overview of the CSA concept and grounding it in core economic principles. The second section is devoted to a set of case studies illustrating the economic basis of CSA in terms of reducing vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity and ex-post risk coping. The final section addresses policy issues related to climate change. Providing information on this new and important field in an approachable way, this book helps make sense of CSA and fills intellectual and policy gaps by defining the concept and placing it within an economic decision-making framework. This book will be of interest to agricultural, environmental, and natural resource economists, development economists, and scholars of development studies, climate change, and agriculture. It will also appeal to policy-makers, development practitioners, and members of governmental and non-governmental organizations interested in agriculture, food security and climate change.

This volume discusses the need to adopt Climate-Resilient Agriculture (CRA) practices to address the increasing global impact that climate change has on agricultural productivity and agriculture-dependent communities. This approach applies technological, policy and economic measures to achieve sustainable agricultural growth in the sectors of grain, fruit, vegetable, fiber, feed, livestock, fisheries and forestry, with the ultimate goal of adapting and building resilience to climate change. The book also uses GIS, crop modeling and remote sensing techniques for future climate resilience applications in agriculture, and covers pest control measures that avoid the use of pesticides to boost crop and livestock productivity for improved food security. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in environmental science, climate science, sustainability and agriculture, as well as policy makers and environmental organizations.

This publication presents the achievements of the International Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture project, which include capacity development, training, information-sharing and several country studies. The project notably contributed to feasibility studies in Botswana, Ecuador and Ethiopia, as well as a case study on Italy that showcased conservation agriculture as a successful approach to overcoming soil fertility loss and erosion in 15 regions. The publication demonstrates how the project has laid the foundations for a strong knowledge community to support climate-smart agriculture (CSA) implementation across countries and regions, thereby contributing to international climate commitments and sustainable development in the field of agriculture and food security. The International Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture project was funded by the Ministry of Environment, Land and Sea of Italy (IMELS) and implemented by FAO, in order to advance knowledge-sharing, learning and partnership-building around the CSA approach and to create a Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA).

Global climate change threatens human existence through its potential impact on agriculture and the environment. Agriculture is climate-sensitive, and climate variability and climate change have net negative impact on it. Additionally, the agricultural landscape is affected by monoculture and agro-biodiversity loss, soil fertility depletion and soil loss, competition from biofuel production, crop yield plateaus and invasive species. Nevertheless, the global agricultural production system has to meet the food demands from the growing human population, which is set to exceed 10 billion by 2050. This book discusses the impacts of climate change on agriculture, animal husbandry and rural livelihoods. Further, since agriculture, forestry and other land-use sectors contribute about 10–12 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent per year, it argues that agricultural policy must dovetail adaptation and mitigation strategies to reduce greenhouse gases emissions. This calls for a reformative and disruptive agricultural strategy like climate-smart agriculture, which can operate at all spatio-temporal scales with few modifications. The book also redefines sustainable agriculture through the lens of climate-smart agriculture in the context of the sustainability of Earth's life- support system and inter- and intra-generational equity. The climate-smart agriculture approach is gaining currency thanks to its inherent positive potential, and its goal to establish an agricultural system which includes "climate-smart food systems", "climate-proof farms", and "climate-smart soils". Climate-smart agriculture provides a pathway to achieve sustainable development goals which focus on poverty reduction, food security, and environmental health.

This series of technical briefs aims to provide a solid knowledge base for building or strengthening stakeholder capacities on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and applying CSA practices to five crops that are critical to the global agri-food sector: coffee, cowpea, maize, rice and wheat. These briefing notes reflect the growing recognition of the need to share knowledge, best practices, lessons learned and experiences on CSA. They are intended to support stakeholders to make the transition to more sustainable and resilient crop production systems and, thereby reach targets laid out in the Sustainable Development Goals. It is our intent to reach a broad range of stakeholders with this knowledge, especially as we begin a new era of global dialogue on how to transform our food systems.