This sourcebook is a reference tool focussing on climate-smart agriculture (CSA). It examines CSA’s potential, its challenges and its limitations in the agricultural sector, including forestry and fisheries at national and subnational levels. The sourcebook aims to assist political and technical managers to understand options available for policy and planning, investments and interventions to make the agricultural sector, landscapes and food systems more climate-smart.
FAO defines CSA as:
- sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes;
- adapting and building resilience to climate change; and
- reducing and/or removing greenhouse gases emissions, where possible.
CSA aims to strengthen livelihoods and food security, especially of smallholders through improving natural resource management and adopting appropriate methods and technologies. It takes into consideration social, economic, and environmental contexts. The integrated landscape approach is a key component, following principles of ecosystem management and sustainable land and water use. CSA also supports countries in establishing appropriate policy, technical and financial means to mainstream climate change into agricultural sectors.
Agriculture must transform itself to feed a growing global population, generate economic growth and poverty reduction and address the adverse effects of climate change, such as reduced production and lower income. Developing countries and smallholder farmers and pastoralists in particular are especially hit by these changes. Coordination across agricultural sectors (e.g. crops, livestock, forestry and fisheries), as well as with other sectors (e.g. energy, water), is essential in order to capitalise on potential synergies, reduce trade-offs (including needs of different stakeholders), and optimise natural resource use and ecosystem services.
The magnitude and immediacy of climate change on agriculture creates a compelling case to integrate CSA into national agricultural planning, investments and programmes. However, CSA implementation is challenging, in large part due to lack of experience and tools. Climate-smart interventions are location-specific and knowledge-intensive; they require capacities and efforts similar to sustainable agricultural development processes that have gained recent popularity, but remain unrealised. CSA practices, policies and institutions are not necessarily new but unfamiliar to farmers, herders and fishers in the context of climate change. A distinctive feature is addressing the multiple challenges faced by agriculture and food systems simultaneously and holistically – which will help avoid counterproductive policies, legislation and financing. More productive and resilient agriculture requires changes in national and local governance, legislation, policies and financial mechanisms to bring about a major shift in the management of land, water, soil nutrients and genetic resources.
The sourcebook is divided into three sections:
- “The Case for Climate-Smart Agriculture”: establishes the conceptual framework of CSA, including the rationale and adoption of a landscape approach;
- “Improved Technologies and Approaches for Sustainable Farm Management”: is targeted at planners and practitioners, and analyses specific issues to be addressed in different sectors, i.e. water, soils, energy, genetic resources for up-scaling of practices of crop production, livestock, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture, and sustainable and inclusive food value chains; and
- “Enabling frameworks”: is targeted at policy makers, with guidance concerning institutional, policy and finance options for CSA. It also examines links with both disaster risk reduction and safety nets, and discusses the critical role of capacity development, assessments and monitoring.