Climate smart agriculture: A roadmap to sustainable agriculture

Abstract

Agriculture systems globally are predicted to be altered drastically because of future climate change, resulting in not only posing challenges to food security, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but also increasing uncertainty and vulnerability to various livelihoods. Agricultural systems have become very important not only for their role in achieving food security but also in mitigation of the climate change. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has been advocated as a strategy to address the challenges of climate change and food security by sustainably increasing productivity, strengthening resilience, and reducing GHG emissions, thereby achieving national food security and sustainable development goals. CSA has three major objectives viz. adaptation, mitigation, and productivity, which can be achieved by a combination of strategies that have traditionally been applied in the areas of conservation, climate change, environmental studies, ecology and agricultural farms along with financial assistance. Some of the important approaches to achieving the goals of CSA are effective resource management, advancing integrated renewable energy technology in agricultural systems, technical knowledge of farmers, promoting the role of institutions in CSA improvement, crop genetic modification investment, improving land use management, changing crop season, crop relocation, effective pest control, creating a forecasting system, and or using crop modeling techniques. The major challenge of CSA in the present scenario is to bridge the science-policy gap by creating an appropriate combination of strategies that can maximize synergies among the CSA components as well as avoid conflicting policies and negative trade-offs, especially with limited resources and competing food security priorities. Cross-disciplinary and multi-objective approaches in CSA are needed to strengthen the interface of the ecological, social, management, and economic dimensions thereby supporting maximum participation by various stakeholder groups around the world. © 2023 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.