Climate-smart agriculture aims to sustainably increase productivity and incomes, adapt and build resilience to climate change, and reduce and/or remove greenhouse gas emissions. It involves adopting various agricultural practices at the local, national, and global scales that improve food security through higher yields while addressing climate change adaptation and mitigation. However, constraints like a lack of knowledge and training, insecure land tenure, and short-term losses versus long-term benefits can inhibit smallholders from adopting climate-smart practices.

1. What is climate-smart agriculture ?
Agriculture that sustainably increases productivity, resilience
(adaptation), reduces/removes greenhouse gases (mitigation),
and enhances achievement of national food security and
development goals (FAO, 2010).
FAO Climate Smart Website WWW.FAO.ORG/CLIMATECHANGE/CLIMATESMART/EN

2. It’s all about scale
• Climate-smart agriculture can have different meanings depending upon
the scale at which it is being applied
• At local scale: opportunities for higher production, e.g. through improved
management
• At national scale: e.g. providing frameworks that incentivize sustainable
management practices
• At global scale: e.g. setting rules for global trade
• For smallholders: greater food security and resilience against shocks
• For intensive agriculture: opportunities to reduce emissions
It will be important to ensure that the different temporal and
spatial scales work together properly

3. Some climate-smart agricultural practices
Crop management Livestock Soil and water Agroforestry Integrated food
management management energy systems
Intercropping Improved feeding Conservation Boundary trees Biogas
with legumes strategies agriculture and hedgerows Production of
Crop rotations Rotational grazing Contour planting Nitrogen-fixing energy plants
New crop Fodder crops Terraces and trees on farms Improved stoves
varieties Grassland bunds Multipurpose
Improved storage restoration and Planting pits trees
and processing conservation Water storage Improved fallow
techniques Manure Alternate wetting with fertilizer
Greater crop treatment and drying (rice) shrubs
diversity Improved Dams, pits, ridges Woodlots
livestock health Improved Fruit orchards
Animal husbandry irrigation (drip)
improvements
All practices presented here improve food security and lead to
higher productivity, but their ability to address adaptation and
mitigation varies

4. Constraints: innovation and food security
Relationship between
innovativeness (number
of farming system
changes) and household
food security (number
of food deficit months).
Error bars indicate the
95% confidence interval
of the mean

5. Constraints: short term losses vs. long
term benefits
Short term income losses often inhibit smallholders from
investing in management practices that provide long term
benefits (schematic not drawn to scale).

6. Constraints: lack of knowledge and training

7. Constraints: insecure tenure
Net return on land
Freehold: $347/ha
Unadjudicated: $110/ha
Net tenure effect: 3.1

8. Recommendations
• Provide an enabling legal and political environment
• Improve market accessibility
• Involve farmers in the project-planning process
• Improve access to knowledge and training
• Introduce more secure tenure
• Overcome the barriers of high opportunity costs to land
• Improve access to farm implements and capital

9. Questions
• What is climate-smart agriculture? E.g. does CSA only
constitute when all three areas are positive?
• What are the key areas / practices: did I miss any?
• What constitutes a benefit and tradeoff in terms of
production, mitigation, adaptation?
• Which practices go well together? Exclude each other?
• What are the implementation requirements?
• What are barriers to implementation?

10. Suggestion for special issue or book
• Scope?
• Review of practices by benefits, tradeoffs, synergies,
implementation, etc.
• Use the recommendations to frame the chapters
• Case studies
• Research gaps and what is needed to overcome them