Understanding Climate Smart Agriculture in brief

The world has changed and so has climate. In the past years we have experienced dramatic change in climate in line with increasing temperatures, changed in rainfall patterns, high levels of carbon emission and green house gases emissions. The world forest has suffered harm and has continued to face high rates of deforestation. These changes have seen the world agricultural practices faced challenges in terms of reduced productivity and income.

Climate change has reduced global yields of maize and wheat by 3.8% and 5.5% respectively. With temperature exceeding critical physiological thresholds there is a deep decrease in production while increase in climate variability exacerbates production risks and challenges farmer’s coping ability. Climate change is a threat to food access since it reduces agricultural productivity, incomes and also increase risks of disruption to the markets.

Climate smart agriculture (CSA ) is an integrated approach aimed at transforming and reorienting the current agricultural systems to support food security under the existing realities of climate change. The changes in climate has seen agricultural productivity faced challenged for instance the reduced agricultural productivity and increase the vulnerability of the population that depend on agriculture for their live hoods. These challenges can be overcome by increasing the adaptive capacity to farmers’ resilience and resource use efficiency in the production systems. (Leslie lipper et al).

Climate resilient pathways focused on four main action points that include:-

1. Building evidence
2. Increasing local institutional effectiveness
3. Fostering coherence between climate and agricultural policies

4.Linking climate and agricultural financing.

Currently 20% of the population is under average food insecure with 75% of these population who are also the world poorest are living in the rural areas. It is for this reason that there is need to increase income and productivity as a measure towards eradicating poverty and achieving food security. By the year 2050, 2.4 Billion people are expected to be living in the developing countries thus need for increase in agricultural productivity by 60%.

Climate smart agriculture as an accelerator towards food security serves under three guiding pillars:-

• Sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes.
• Adapting and building resilience to climate change.
• Reducing and/ or removing carbon emissions.

CSA appears as an obligatory field-level supplement designated to safeguard agricultural intensifications from climate change impact. The World Bank has integrated CSA into long standing modernization narrative that seeks to address the problems of the global food system that are largely to be tackled by the increasing supply through liberalization, technological advancement and the diffusion of modern production techniques to the developing world.

On the basis, the framework of a climate – wise food system could seek to put emphasis on:-

Climate change amplifies concerns over access to sufficient and nutritious food thus the acquisition of food distribution becomes critical.

Shift in the consumption patterns are essential elements of the climate-wise food system. The tyranny of consumers’ sovereignty that reflects the embedded power of money as a claim on global resources should not be allowed to dictate it’s dynamic.

The climate-wise food system would be predicated upon strong normative preference for ecological intensification in which biological processes in combination with human labor productivity advances rather than cheap energy inputs( Tittonell,2014)

Like a small baby learning to walk by herself, CSA requires an enabling environment that will see it adoption and implementation a success. The private, public sectors, the civil society organizations needs to give room to: policy and legislation development, program development, review and mainstreaming, promotion, awareness and publicity.