Section outline
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What is Climate Smart Agriculture?
Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is a term which combines three main purposes in one:
- To increase farmers’ productivity and incomes
- To adapt agriculture to environmental and local conditions and to climate change
- To reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) from agriculture
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The concept is useful in order to maximize agricultural production and farmers income with due consideration to sustainable natural resource management under any context and local condition.
Image: Adrian Infernus, www.unsplash.com
The concept of CSA was developed by the FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organisaiton of the UN) as an approach for how agriculture can address climate change.
Climate change will have far-reaching consequences on agriculture related to heat stress on crops and livestock, more erratic rains, land degradation, biodiversity loss, effects on pests and diseases, and changes in food quality and food diversity. Socio-economic effects include rising food prices, possible food shortages, migration, and civil unrest.
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Adaptation to the local context
The CSA technologies and approaches proposed will always have to be adapted to the local conditions. For small-scale farmers, the emphasis will be on increasing food production and income and adapting to climate change. Mitigation of GHG is also important in a global context, but there is a much greater potential to reduce emissions from industrialized countries. Small-scale farmers have generally low GHG emissions, and the potential to reduce emissions among them is low. However, it is important to look at technologies and approaches that increase productivity, reduce vulnerability to climate change, and mitigate GHG emissions at the same time (triple wins).
Rehabilitation of degraded cultivated land can be an example of an approach with triple wins as it can increase productivity, reduce vulnerability to climate change by improving soil quality, and contribute to the accumulation of carbon in soil and vegetation (carbon sequestration). A good approach is to look for agricultural technologies that can increase productivity on existing land while minimizing the negative environmental effects of farming. Such an approach will also preserve biodiversity as forests generally have the highest biodiversity.
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Best practices of CSA
Examples of good CSA practices and approaches include water-harvest methods, seed priming, microdosing of fertilizer, appropriate mechanization, land rehabilitation, fodder production and conservation, conservation agriculture, sustainable rice intensification, kitchen gardens, animal fattening, improved poultry production, and the use of climate services in agriculture. These themes will be explained in different sections of these resources.
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CSA promotes crop- and livestock diversity by stimulating crop rotations, intercropping and stimulating the broader diversity of crops and livestock. This can give synergies within the farm and ensure a more stable income. Diversification will reduce the risk of failures and improve farmers' resilience to unforeseen events like climatic disasters. To enhance income resilience, promoting income-generating activities that are less reliant on rainfall is crucial. Examples include establishing kitchen gardens, raising small ruminants and chickens, and diversifying into off-farm income opportunities.