Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change

Abstract

Climate change reduces agricultural productivity and leads to greater instability in crop production, disrupting the global food supply and resulting in food and nutritional insecurity. A transformation of the agricultural sector towards climate-resilient practices is urgently needed to successfully tackle food security and climate change challenges. Climate-smart agriculture is an approach that guides farmers’ actions to transform agri-food systems towards building the agricultural sector’s resilience to climate change based on three pillars: increasing farm productivity and incomes, enhancing the resilience of livelihoods and ecosystems, and reducing and removing greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere. Promoting the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices is crucial to improve smallholder farmers’ capacity to adapt to climate change and mitigate its impact, as well as help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Although smallholder farmers worldwide have adopted numerous practices and technologies (e.g., integrated crop systems, improved pest, water, and nutrient management, improved grassland management, reduced tillage and use of diverse varieties and breeds, restoring degraded lands, and improved the efficiency of input use) to reach the objectives of climate-smart agriculture, the increased uncertainty that climate change imposes calls for more flexible and rapid response capacity in smallholder farming systems. With this special issue, we seek to comprehensively understand the associations between climate-smart agriculture and sustainable agricultural development. To achieve this goal, we aim to find answers to these questions: What are the climate-smart agricultural practices and technologies (either single or multiple) that are currently adopted in smallholder farming systems? What are the key barriers, challenges, and drivers of promoting climate-smart agricultural practices? What are the impacts of adopting these practices? Answers to these questions will help devise appropriate solutions for promoting sustainable agricultural production and rural development. They will also provide insights for policymakers to design appropriate policy instruments to develop agricultural practices and technologies and promote them to sustainably enhance the farm sector’s resilience to climate change and increase productivity.