What is Climate Smart Agriculture?

Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is an integrated approach to managing landscapes that helps farmers adopt agricultural methods, for both livestock and crops, to address the ongoing human-induced climate change and, where possible, mitigate its effects by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. CSA aims to reorient the existing systems of production to ensure more sustainability, it does not reinvent the wheel.  

CSA has three main objectives which also form its pillars. They are as follows:

1. Increased productivity: Produce more food to improve food and nutrition security for the world’s growing population. This also leads to boosting incomes of 75 percent of the world’s poor people who live in rural areas and mainly rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.

2. Enhanced resilience: Reduce vulnerability to drought, pests, disease and other shocks; and improve capacity to adapt and grow in the face of longer-term stresses like shortened seasons and erratic weather patterns.

3. Reduced emissions: Pursue lower emissions for each kilo of food produced, avoid deforestation from agriculture and identify ways to sequester carbon from the atmosphere within the agricultural systems.

CSA can facilitate a transition to agriculture and food systems that are more productive, more sustainable and more climate-friendly. This is achieved by promoting the adoption of climate-smart practices that have been proven to be effective based on solid evidence, and providing an enabling environment that includes conducive policies, institutions and finance.

CSA approaches help identify which production systems are suitable for adaptation and, where possible, mitigation, and enable institutions to scale up their response to tackle the challenges of climate change in specific locations. CSA approaches set out to isolate and address trade-offs that may need to be made between the three objectives of CSA. Out of this process emerge pragmatic, context-specific options that can guide evidence-based decision making. The key to success is a long-term, coordinated effort by stakeholders at all levels.