Climate-smart agriculture: Insights and challenges
Yilai Lou, Liangshan Feng, Wen Xing, Ning Hu, Elke Noellemeyer, Edith Le Cadre, Kazunori Minamikawa, Pardon Muchaonyerwa, Mohamed A. E. AbdelRahman, Érika Flávia Machado Pinheiro, W. de Vries, Jian Liu, Scott X. Chang, Jizhong Zhou, Zhanxiang Sun, Weiping Hao, Xurong Mei
Abstract
Agriculture, broadly defined to include crop and livestock production, forestry, aquaculture and fishery, represents a key source or sink of greenhouse gas emissions. It is also a vulnerable sector under climate change. The term climate-smart agriculture has been widely used since its inception in 2010, but no clear and unified understanding of its scientific meaning exists. Here, we systematically analyzed the relationship between agriculture and climate change and interpreted the scientific definition of climate-smart agriculture. We believe that climate-smart agriculture represents a modern production approach to coordinatively promote food security, climate mitigation benefits and agricultural adaptation to climate change towards the Sustainable Development Goals. In addition, due to the worsening global climate change situation, we expounded on the urgency and major challenges in promoting climate-smart agriculture.