Climate-smart agriculture global research agenda: scientific basis for action

By K. Steenwerth, A. Hodson, A. Bloom, Michael R. Carter, Andrea Cattaneo, C. Chartres, Jerry L. Hatfield, K. Henry, J. Hopmans, William R. Horwath and 17 more. Agriculture & Food Security, 2014

274 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundClimate-smart agriculture (CSA) addresses the challenge of meeting the growing demand for food, fibre and fuel, despite the changing climate and fewer opportunities for agricultural expansion on additional lands. CSA focuses on contributing to economic development, poverty reduction and food security; maintaining and enhancing the productivity and resilience of natural and agricultural ecosystem functions, thus building natural capital; and reducing trade-offs involved in meeting these goals. Current gaps in knowledge, work within CSA, and agendas for interdisciplinary research and science-based actions identified at the 2013 Global Science Conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture (Davis, CA, USA) are described here within three themes: (1) farm and food systems, (2) landscape and regional issues and (3) institutional and policy aspects. The first two themes comprise crop physiology and genetics, mitigation and adaptation for livestock and agriculture, barriers to adoption of CSA practices, climate risk management and energy and biofuels (theme 1); and modelling adaptation and uncertainty, achieving multifunctionality, food and fishery systems, forest biodiversity and ecosystem services, rural migration from climate change and metrics (theme 2). Theme 3 comprises designing research that bridges disciplines, integrating stakeholder input to directly link science, action and governance.OutcomesIn addition to interdisciplinary research among these themes, imperatives include developing (1) models that include adaptation and transformation at either the farm or landscape level; (2) capacity approaches to examine multifunctional solutions for agronomic, ecological and socioeconomic challenges; (3) scenarios that are validated by direct evidence and metrics to support behaviours that foster resilience and natural capital; (4) reductions in the risk that can present formidable barriers for farmers during adoption of new technology and practices; and (5) an understanding of how climate affects the rural labour force, land tenure and cultural integrity, and thus the stability of food production. Effective work in CSA will involve stakeholders, address governance issues, examine uncertainties, incorporate social benefits with technological change, and establish climate finance within a green development framework. Here, the socioecological approach is intended to reduce development controversies associated with CSA and to identify technologies, policies and approaches leading to sustainable food production and consumption patterns in a changing climate.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

Chemical Pesticides and Human Health: The Urgent Need for a New Concept in Agriculture (2016, background): “A concept as such is climate-smart agriculture that seeks solutions in the new context of climate change (152, 153).”
The climate-smart village approach : framework of an integrative strategy for scaling up adaptation options in agriculture (2018, background): “The options were prioritized by either (a) choice experiments with farmers and local governments (Taneja et al. 2014) or (b) the climate-smart adaptation prioritization toolkit (Shirsath et al. 2016).”
Climate-smart agriculture: perspectives and framings (2018, background): “Sustainable intensification in agriculture has been stimulated by a sense of urgency or the ‘doomsday’ attitude to address the food security challenge under business-as-usual climate change scenarios (Steenwerth et al., 2014).”
Stakeholders prioritization of climate-smart agriculture interventions: Evaluation of a framework (2019, background): “Adoption of CSA technologies, practices and services are highly influenced by potential adaptation benefits of CSA, technology implementation feasibility, adoption barriers, and incentive mechanisms provided by government and other agencies to the farmers and farming communities (Steenwerth et al., ”