Agtech has become an essential part of modern agriculture practices like smart agri, digital agriculture, and vertical farming. Various agtech solutions are developed by companies and startups to make smart agri affordable, sustainable, and scalable for smallholder farmers. Environmental challenges are forcing farmers to adopt sustainable agricultural practices while maintaining production. Climate-smart agri is one of the innovative concepts emerging in sustainable agricultural practices. It is defined as an approach for transforming and reorienting agricultural development under the new realities of climate change.
Climate-smart agri:
The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) defines climate-smart agri as the agriculture that sustainably increases productivity, enhances resilience, reduces greenhouse gas emissions where possible, and enhances the achievement of national food security and development goals. The primary goal of climate-smart agri is food security and development that interlinks other necessary pillars like productivity, mitigation, and adaptation.
Characteristics of Climate-smart agri:
Addresses Climate Change: Conventional agricultural practices add significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, and soil pollution. In contrast, climate-smart agri practices optimise the chemical and other resource utilisation that reduces emissions as well as pollution caused throughout the agricultural life cycle.
Integrates multiple goals and manages trade-offs: Climate-smart agri uses agtech and achieves increased productivity, enhanced resilience, and reduced emissions. But, sometimes it is difficult to achieve all the goals and thus trade-offs need to be considered. Climate-smart agri strategies and planning help to manage such trade-offs.
Maintains ecosystem services: Climate-smart agri ensures that farmers are not contributing to the degradation of ecosystem services like clean water, air, materials, and food. It adopts a landscape approach to build upon sustainable agriculture principles, integrated planning and management, and narrow down sectoral approaches resulting in uncoordinated and competing land uses.
Multiple entry points at different levels: Climate-smart agri has multiple entry points, from technology and practices developed to the climate change models and scenarios elaboration, value chains, insurance schemes, information technologies, institutional and political enabling environments strengthening and so on. Thus, it integrates multiple technologies to integrate multiple interventions in the food system, value chain, landscape, and policies.
Context-specific practices: Climate-smart practices in one place may not be the same in another. Thus, interventions should be considered while adopting climate-smart agri practices at the landscape level, within or among ecosystems as well as in institutional and political realities and arrangements.
Engagement of women and marginalised groups: Climate-smart agri involves the poorest and vulnerable groups living on marginal lands with climate events vulnerability to achieve food security goals and enhanced resilience.