Climate-smart agriculture should be livelihood-smart too

Anthony Aisi in Africa Science News: Climate-smart agriculture must target the short-term needs of the smallholder farmer to be effective in combating climate change. Encouraging climate-smart agriculture can lead to climate change adaptation practices in a partnership where the farmer’s needs are addressed.

“Climate-smart agriculture has the potential to increase sustainable productivity, increase the resilience of farming systems to climate impacts and mitigate climate change through greenhouse gas emission reductions and carbon sequestration,” says Henry Neufeldt the lead expert on climate change at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF).

Agroforestry, is one such climate-smart agricultural practice, and it has tremendous potential for both climate change adaptation and mitigation as well as providing a source of fuel, food, medicine and supplementing the diets of smallholder farmers.

Tree-based farming systems need to be encouraged as part of a low carbon emissions development pathway and adaptation strategy. For example, in tropical forest margins, agroforestry has been used in several protected area landscape buffer zones and within conservation areas as one way of alleviating pressure on forests for timber, thereby reducing deforestation and the resultant loss of carbon sinks...

Agroforestry in Burkina Faso with Borassus akeassii and Faidherbia albida, shot by Marco Schmidt [1], Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license