Sustainable Agriculture For Climate Change Adaptation

The Anthropocene, the time of humans. Never has human influence on the functioning of the planet been greater or in more urgent need of mitigation. Climate change, the accelerated warming of the planet’s surface attributed to human activities, is now at the forefront of global politics. The agriculture sector not only contributes to climate change but also feels the severity of its effects, with the water, carbon and nitrogen cycles all subject to modification as a result. Crop production systems are each subject to different types of threat and levels of threat intensity. There is however significant potential to both adapt to and mitigate climate change within the agricultural sector and reduce these threats. Each solution must be implemented in a sustainable manner and tailored to individual regions and farming systems. This Special Issue evaluates a variety of potential climate change adaptation and mitigation techniques that account for this spatial variation, including modification to cropping systems, Climate-Smart Agriculture and the development and growth of novel crops and crop varieties.

Ever-increasing population growth, combined with ongoing climate change signals that agriculture will face great challenges in ensuring global food security by 2050. Additionally, climate change-driven variations in mean sea level, wave conditions, storm surge, droughts, and river flows could have serious effects on agriculture and other sectors. Considering these factors and the extremely high value and necessity of agriculture worldwide, effective adaptation measures underpinned by reliable climate change impact assessments are essential to conserve soil and water resources and ensure food security. Sustainable Agriculture: Adaptation Strategies to Address Climate Change by 2050 provides a thorough examination of these issues, and presents in-depth analysis, practical case studies, and numerous examples of adaptation options throughout for various regions of the world. Features: Presents up-to-date, scientifically robust information on climate change projections in Europe, Asia, America, Africa, and Australia Provides pathways to sustainable agricultural options rather than just defining the climate change issue Includes case studies and practical examples throughout the world Presents a framework by which policymakers can begin implementing strategies for improving agricultural productivity

The Anthropocene, the time of humans. Never has human influence on the functioning of the planet been greater or in more urgent need of mitigation. Climate change, the accelerated warming of the planet's surface attributed to human activities, is now at the forefront of global politics. The agriculture sector not only contributes to climate change but also feels the severity of its effects, with the water, carbon and nitrogen cycles all subject to modification as a result. Crop production systems are each subject to different types of threat and levels of threat intensity. There is however significant potential to both adapt to and mitigate climate change within the agricultural sector and reduce these threats. Each solution must be implemented in a sustainable manner and tailored to individual regions and farming systems. This Special Issue evaluates a variety of potential climate change adaptation and mitigation techniques that account for this spatial variation, including modification to cropping systems, Climate-Smart Agriculture and the development and growth of novel crops and crop varieties.

Human activity is changing the global environment at an unprecedented rate while humanity faces a range of complex and interrelated challenges to local, regional and global development, human security and politics. Food security ranks high on the science, policy and development agendas. However, most research linking global change and food systems examines the impact of climate change on agricultural production, or the impact of agriculture on land use, pollution and biodiversity, overlooking interactions with other aspects of the food system – such as food processing, packaging, transportation and consumption and employment derived from these activities. This book demonstrates that new threats to food security which arise from environmental change require more than simply a focus on agricultural practices – what is needed is an integrated food system approach. The authors point out that the process of adapting food systems to global environmental change is not simply a search for technological solutions to increase agricultural yields. Tradeoffs across multiple scales among food system outcomes are a prevalent feature of globalized food systems. Within food systems, there are key underexplored areas that are both sensitive to environmental change and crucial to understanding its implications for food security and adaptation strategies. The authors assert that technical prescriptions alone will not efficiently manage the food security challenge. This book is their contribution to a new paradigm, which addresses food systems holistically by engaging researchers in multiple disciplines to understand the causes and drivers of vulnerability.

In farming systems across Canada, effective risk management is necessary to deal with drought, flooding, and extreme weather, and to adapt to altered climate and weather conditions. Unfortunately, climate change risks and opportunities are not always well understood among researchers and policy makers in the Canadian agri-food sector. This book addresses that gap by providing a wide-ranging synopsis of what climate change means for Canadian agriculture, exploring different approaches to the topic, and presenting examples of current research. It covers all agricultural regions and a wide variety of commodity production and farming systems. This comprehensive survey synthesizes twenty years of research on climate change and Canadian agriculture.

This report examines the economic and policy issues related to the impacts of climate change on agriculture and adaptation responses and to the mitigation of greenhouse gases from agriculture.

This volume is the first centralized source of technological and policy solutions for sustainable agriculture and food systems resilience in the face of climate change. The editors have compiled a comprehensive collection of the latest tested, replicable green technologies and approaches for food security, including smart crops and new agricultural paradigms, sustainable natural resources management, and strategies for risk assessment and governance. Studies from resource-constrained countries with vulnerable populations are emphasized, with contributions on multisector partnership from development professionals. Debates concerning access to climate-smart technologies, intellectual property rights, and international negotiations on technology transfer are also included. The editors are, respectively, a public health physician, a development professional and an environmental scientist. They bring their varied perspectives together to curate a holistic volume that will be useful for policy makers, scientists, community-based organizations, international organizations and researchers across the world.

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.