Study suggests that climate smart agriculture can boost yields, reduce hunger and emissions globally

Climate change is a threat to agriculture production around the world, especially for developing countries and at lower latitudes. The impacts are starting to accumulate: Climate change may have already contributed to a 1%-2% loss of crop yields per decade in the past century. Agriculture itself contributes to the problem, with yearly emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) accounting for about 11% of total anthropogenic emissions (not including land use change).

With close to 1 billion people still going hungry around the world, and climate challenges expected to worsen, climate smart agriculture (CSA) has been gaining attention as an approach that promises to address both adaptation and mitigation concerns. CSA is essentially a form of sustainable intensification, with an added focus on climate outcomes and tradeoffs across objectives. While considerable resources have been mobilized to promote the approach globally, CSA has been widely studied only at the farm scale, but the effects of a global-level adoption have never been analyzed.

Photo credit: Nirmal Sigtia/IWMI