The potential of climate-smart agriculture to help achieve food security, reduce poverty and create economic development while enhancing the resilience of natural and agricultural ecosystem functions is discussed in an article on Biomed Central.
“Research must be at the heart of decision-making for dealing with climate change, so that realistic scenarios, risk analysis and trade-offs become part of planning and financial investments intended to build adaptation and resilience for agriculture,” say the scientists who authored an open access article on climate-smart agriculture published in Agriculture and Food Security.
The article comes out of the 2013 Global Science Conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture and is authored by scientists from many disciplines, including crop and animal physiologists, hydrologists, soil scientists, ecologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists and geographers. Ravi Prabhu, Deputy Director General – Research, at the World Agroforestry Centre is among the authors.
“The article shows that when interdisciplinary science is conducted with stakeholder partnerships, then solutions are both pertinent to specific situations and have more benefits for local communities.”
One example of CSA highlighted in the article is research into improving different types of agroforestry systems in Kenya in order to provide food and timber to smallholders and support home gardens, plots for food and cash crops, pasture, woodlots and native forests. Researchers are analyzing the trade-offs involved in land use decisions and ways to provide financial rewards to local communities for the biodiversity, carbon storage and increased soil quality that result from this landscape diversification.
Climate-smart agriculture works across landscapes at the interface of agriculture and forestry, as well as wetland and marine systems. This management across the whole landscape is “crucial to balance trade-offs”.
The article demonstrates the momentum that has already built among the science community for climate-smart agriculture. A Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture will be launched at the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit in New York City in September 2014.
Read the full story: Climate-smart agriculture: scientists show agricultural progress in responding to climate change
