Study Note - Climate Change – Climate Smart Agriculture

One of the biggest challenges facing the world’s food supply in the future is climate change – a warmer world, or one with more extreme weather changes could cause instability in current food-producing regions, in particular the wheat belts of the USA and the Ukraine.

The ‘Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations’ (FAO) have produced a useful website and documents surrounding Climate Smart Agriculture, an initiative intended to secure the world’s food supply by altering agricultural techniques in developing countries, in particular in the areas of rice production, urban agriculture, fisheries and aquaculture, and livestock production efficiency.

An introductory video to the scheme can be viewed here (though I have had difficulty with getting it to run at a decent frame-rate):

http://wbi.worldbank.org/wbi/multimedia/climate-smart-agriculture

Climate Smart Agriculture is defined as:

‘agriculture that increases productivity, resilience (adaptation), reduces/removes greenhouse gases (mitigation), and enhances achievement of national food security and development goals’.

One example of a project where Climate Smart Agriculture has been used to improve water harvesting and use is in Burkina Faso, where farmers reclaimed degraded land by digging planting pits, known as zaï. This traditional technique was improved by increasing the depth and diameter of the pits and adding organic matter. Depending on the amount of rainfall experienced, this formerly barely productive land now produces anything between 300kg per hectare to 1500kg per hectare, greatly increasing the food stability of the area, and decreasing the reliance on foreign aid donations and outsourced food.