News

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) includes a range of practies - some well established and others recently developed - that aim to increase farmers' food security, livelihoods and resilience to climate change while also providing mitigation co-benefits to the extent possible.  

While some agricultural practices have been researched at length and in various locations, there is not yet a database of climate-smart agricultural practices and technologies that work well and where, and would thus allow farmers, extension agents, or policy-makers to decide which practices to scale up and how. But that database is on the way, and preliminary findings are becoming available.

Todd Rosenstock, scientist at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), is coordinating with scientists from CCAFS and partner organizations to:

• Map the available literature and evidence across a range of highly-cited potential CSA practices to evaluate the evidence base and identify knowledge gaps.
• Conduct a quantitative meta-analysis to understand the depth of scientific evidence for each of the three components of CSA, highlighting the synergies and trade-offs of potential CSA practices, including across systems and continents.
• Analyze barriers to/determinants of adoption of CSA practices, including impacts on the workloads of women, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the enabling environments for practices covered in the meta-analysis.