Technological Approaches for Climate Smart Agriculture

Climate change poses significant challenges to global food security. This abstract explores the intricate relationship between climate change and its impacts on agriculture, food production, and the subsequent repercussions on food security worldwide. Rising global temperatures, extreme weather events, changing precipitation patterns, and disruptions in ecosystems profoundly affect agricultural productivity. Shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns can lead to reduced crop yields, altered growing seasons, and increased vulnerability to pests and diseases. Smallholder farmers, especially in developing countries, bear the brunt of these impacts, facing heightened risks of food insecurity due to their dependence on rain-fed agriculture. Moreover, climate change exacerbates existing food distribution challenges and inequalities. Vulnerable populations, including marginalized communities and regions already grappling with poverty, face amplified risks of food shortages, malnutrition, and hunger due to decreased access to nutritious food sources. Addressing these challenges necessitates multifaceted approaches. Innovations in agricultural practices, including the adoption of climate-resilient crops, sustainable farming techniques, and efficient water management, can mitigate the adverse effects of climate change on food production. Additionally, fostering global cooperation, implementing policies that promote sustainable land use, and investing in research and technology are crucial steps towards ensuring food security in the face of climate change.

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is agriculture that lessens climate change while boosting productivity and resilience. Climate change poses significant challenges to global food security and agricultural sustainability. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has emerged as a promising approach to address these challenges by enhancing agricultural productivity, resilience, and sustainability while mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This abstract provides an overview of CSA, its key principles, and its potential benefits. CSA integrates climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies into agricultural practices, fostering a dual approach to combat climate change impacts. Key principles of CSA include sustainable intensification, climate-resilient crop selection, conservation agriculture, water management, agroforestry, and livestock management. These practices aim to optimize resource use, enhance soil health, conserve water, and promote biodiversity. By adopting CSA practices, farmers can build resilience to climate variability and extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods. CSA promotes the use of climate-resilient crop varieties, efficient irrigation techniques, and soil conservation measures to protect agricultural systems from climate-related risks. Moreover, CSA contributes to carbon sequestration by promoting agroforestry, afforestation, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. Climate information services play a vital role in CSA by providing farmers with timely and accurate climate data and weather forecasts, enabling them to make informed decisions. Additionally, policy support and incentives are essential to encourage the widespread adoption of CSA practices, incentivize investment in climate-smart technologies, and create an enabling environment for sustainable agriculture. While CSA holds great promise for enhancing agricultural productivity and sustainability, successful implementation requires collaboration among stakeholders, including governments, private sectors, research institutions, and local communities. Capacity building and extension services are critical to ensure that farmers are equipped with the knowledge and skills to adopt and benefit from climate-smart practices. In conclusion, climate-smart agriculture offers a pathway to address the challenges of climate change in agriculture and promote food security and environmental sustainability. By integrating adaptation and mitigation strategies, CSA presents a comprehensive and holistic approach to create resilient and sustainable agricultural systems that contribute to global climate change goals.

Climate change is a global issue that has united the nations from the United States of America in the west to Japan in the east. Extreme events like drought, flood, and heavy rainfall have increased both in frequency and intensity. Eighty-four percent of the impact of these events is borne by agriculture. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) based on three principles of enhancing productivity and incomes, augmenting resilience of livelihoods and ecosystems, and lowering and removing greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere is a crucial tool to transform agri-food systems in an approachable manner and mitigate the dreadful effects of climate change while sustainably producing food and energy. Climate-resilient agriculture (CRA) is an approach that includes the sustainable use of existing natural resources to achieve long-term higher productivity and farm incomes under climate variabilities. Various climate-smart and climate-resilient agricultural technologies and practices namely crop diversification, conservation agriculture, soil and nutrient management, integrated pest management, growing crops tolerant to climate change are weapons to fight against the negative impacts of climate change to save the existence of every living organism on this planet. Application of climate-smart and -resilient practices strongly needs to be promoted and backed up by appropriate policies by all countries unitedly.

The livelihoods and food security of millions of small-scale farmers in South Asia are currently under threat caused by anthropogenic soil degradation. The last few decades have seen a growth in crop production, but this has come with a number of drawbacks, including a drop in partial factor productivity, deterioration of the soil, environmental contamination, and an increase in GHG emissions. Reasons are improper agronomic management, non-judicious use of agri-inputs and lack of awareness and knowledge. This chapter highlights the prospects and challenges of better soil management interventions on crop productivity, profitability and environmental security. Furthermore, we also critically review the key drivers and indicators of soil health, carbon dynamics and pathways of scaling ecosystem services. Regenerative agriculture has the potential to feed the world an increased amount of nutrient-rich foods through an inclusive approach. Nature-based solutions must be widespread and integrate with traditional indigenous knowledge for ecosystem management. Soil health is of core significance and directly reflects countries’ prosperity; therefore, we all should conserve and protect our soils from further degradation to achieve SDGs.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) and nutrients are important natural resources that play a vital role in soil fertility management and ecosystem stabilisation. Improvement in SOC and soil nutrients with optimum availability to plants further enhances the growth and productivity of different crops and cropping systems under changing climate and land use systems as a mitigating option under changing climate. Cropping systems and other SOC models have evolved over the last four decades in response to the demand for modelling of SOC and soil nutrients dynamics for their quantification in different crops and cropping systems under varied management practices. Therefore, this chapter attempts to briefly elaborate upon the impact of climate change on plant nutrients and soil organic carbon, SOC and nutrients dynamics in soil, new approaches of nutrient management and new generation fertilisers.

Climate change and accompanying human activities and natural hazards pose significant challenges to sustainable agricultural production. Increasing agricultural productivity to feed the burgeoning population in the face of changing climate and degraded land resources leads to additional degradation and depletion of soil nutrient stocks. The changing climatic conditions and extremes negatively affect all types of food security, namely food availability, access, utilization and stability. Climate changes have an adverse effect on agriculture and different agricultural activity in different ways, e.g. variations in annual rainfall, global warming, emission of greenhouse gases (mainly CO₂), fluctuations in sea water level, heat waves and modification in weeds, pests or microbes. The negative impact of climate change affects crop production and food security worldwide. These abrupt changes in climate variables impact crops’ yield, productivity, livestock, dairy and fisheries, which adversely influence food security and the global economy. Also, variation in the temperature and humidity may increase the insect and pest population, disease in plant population and uncontrolled spread of weeds in crop fields which are the other most prominent threats to crop production and food security. Food quantity and quality remain major issues for researchers because of the evolving environment. In order to evaluate food security comprehensively, future study on this topic has to consider population growth, agricultural output, climate change and water availability. Uncertainty in climate leads to severe economic risks worldwide as agriculture is (more vulnerable to this risk) involved. Timely forecasting the adverse weather pattern may reduce the loss and develop coping capacity among farmers. In this regard, the integrated application of Remote Sensing data and the GIS platform plays a crucial role in agricultural applications. Hence, adopting climate-resilient and sustainable agricultural practices may help vulnerable regions cope with the changing climatic scenario.

Sediment plays a significant role as a source of metal(loids) in peri-urban agriculture, particularly in areas where agricultural land interfaces with urban and industrial activities. Metal(loids) are naturally occurring substances that include metals like lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury and other metals that, at high quantities, can be hazardous to both humans and the environment. These metals can come from several sources and end up in agricultural soils as a result of sediment deposition. Metal(loid) pollution is a serious threat to peri-urban agricultural systems because these pollutants are ubiquitous in nature. They have a tendency to bioaccumulate and biomagnify in food chain and cause severe health risk to living organisms. The sources of these metal(loid)s may be natural or anthropogenic. Natural sources may include atmospheric fallout, diffusion and surface runoff. Anthropogenic sources may include effluent discharge from various industries, medical wastes, domestic sewage disposal, traffic density, application of chemicals and fertilizers. These pollutants affect the physiological, gastrointestinal, reproductive, morphological and immunological system of living organisms. Hence, proper management is required in peri-urban system to overcome the effect of pollutants from its source of origination.

Changes in land use and land cover (LULC) are currently mainly caused by rapid physical development and agricultural operations. Sri Lanka, in particular, is significantly reliant on paddy production, as rice is the country’s staple meal. In terms of rice output, the Hambantota district ranks seventh in Sri Lanka. Sooriyawewa, in the Hambantota district, is in the dry zone and is best known for its paddy agriculture. However, due to continued physical development and the growing tendency of planting other commercially viable crops, paddy agriculture in this area has seen a considerable reduction. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to investigate a system for monitoring LULC changes specifically related to paddy cultivation, utilizing Satellite Remote Sensing within a GIS framework. The study aimed to quantify the land use and land cover (LULC) changes specifically related to paddy cultivation in Sooriyawewa over the past four decades, as well as investigate the underlying factors driving these changes. Landsat images spanning from 1980 to 2019 were utilized as the primary data source, with a defined time interval. To classify the land cover in all of the photos and find differences in paddy farming within the area, the Supervised Classification technique was used. Between 1980 and 2019, significant changes in several land cover categories, including paddy, other crops, woods, waterbodies, built-up areas, and bare lands, were noted. According to the LULC changes, there was a decline of −15.50% in paddy fields, while built-up areas and other crops increased by 11.97% and 10.08%, respectively. The fall in paddy farming raises concerns about the country’s ability to satisfy demand, which has serious consequences for Sri Lanka’s food security. Given the current trajectory, competent authorities must consider the findings of this study in decision-making processes, the development of urban growth plans, infrastructure construction and management, land use planning, natural resource conservation, and environmental sustainability promotion. As a result, this study is highly topical and provides vital insights for policymakers and other stakeholders.

In silico investigations of genetically issues using bioinformatics methods are done using the interdisciplinary discipline of bioinformatics. It entails the development of tools, such as computer programs. Understanding the function and structure of macromolecules (DNA/RNA, proteins), biochemical pathways, evolutionary mechanisms, and disease processes can help to uncover fundamental biological mechanisms. It also includes gene mapping, gene sequencing, varietal information databases, and the mapping and sequencing of genes. The study of genomes, proteomics, and metabolomics in various plant species is another topic covered. Improvement in agricultural output, nutrient content, and disease resistance in plants, among other things, are the ultimate goals of sustainable agriculture. Understanding the genetic and molecular underpinnings of all biologically significant species-relevant plant activities is a crucial element of the study of plant genomics. This insight is essential for the effective use of genetic resources (plants) in the creation of innovative cultigens with enhanced yield standard and lower financial and ecological effects. Bioinformatics tools and databases store and evaluate the plant genetic resource that might be required to enhance healthier, pest-resistant crops, more drought, and increase the standard of produce making them healthier, and productive. The concept of a bioinformatics program has now been envisioned as a highly effective tool for improving plants.

This Part explores the pivotal role of advanced technology in fostering climate-smart farming practices, addressing the challenges posed by climate change in agriculture. As climate change continues to impact global agriculture, innovative technological solutions play a crucial role in ensuring sustainable and resilient farming practices. This abstract delves into the integration of advanced technologies to promote climate-smart agriculture, offering insights into their benefits, challenges, and potential outcomes. Cutting-edge technologies, such as precision agriculture, remote sensing, IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artificial Intelligence), and biotechnology, offer promising avenues to enhance agricultural resilience in the face of changing climatic conditions. Precision agriculture, leveraging data analytics and sensor technologies, enables farmers to optimize resource use, including water, fertilizers, and pesticides, thereby reducing environmental impacts while boosting productivity. Remote sensing techniques, facilitated by satellites and drones, provide real-time data on crop health, soil moisture, and weather patterns, aiding farmers in making informed decisions and mitigating risks associated with climate variability. Additionally, AI-driven models analyze vast datasets to offer predictive insights, optimizing planting times, pest management strategies, and crop selection for climate adaptation. Biotechnological innovations, such as genetically modified crops engineered for drought or pest resistance, hold promise for improving crop yields in adverse climatic conditions. Integrating these technologies into farming practices fosters climate-smart agriculture, enhancing resilience, minimizing resource wastage, and reducing the ecological footprint of agricultural activities. However, challenges persist in adopting and implementing these advanced technologies, including high initial costs, technological literacy barriers, and ethical considerations in biotechnology applications. Moreover, ensuring equitable access to these innovations, especially for smallholder farmers in developing regions, remains a critical concern.

The unprecedented events of climate change affecting all the dimensions of human life urge the need to address appropriate adaptation as well as mitigation strategies. Though working towards the common goal, mitigation strategies have proved to be useful for the long run; on the other hand, adaptation strategies are applicable and useful in the short run itself. There are many options for adaptation and mitigation. This chapter provides a comprehensive view on the concept of such strategies and approaches in different sectors. A decisive component of adaptation and mitigation is the enactment of strategies that are appropriate, economically and socially viable and effective for stakeholders.

Global climate change has a serious impact on agricultural production. Prolonged droughts and severe flooding or start of rainy season that are different than usual affect cropping planning and agricultural production in Indonesia. Climate-smart agriculture offers solutions for both adaptation and mitigation of the impacts of climate change. Implementation of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) models and practices by utilizing and developing current technologies to enhance the sustainability of agriculture. Utilization of space-based data integrated with field-based measurements, such as remote sensing satellite data integrated with climate data, can increase speed and accuracy and help sustainable land management. In Indonesia, the Ministry of Agriculture has developed the Standing Crop Information System (SISCrop) and Crop Calendar Information System (KATAM), providing valuable tools for both policymakers and farmers. These systems facilitate the calculation of seed, fertilizer, pesticide, water requirements, and agricultural tools, contributing to more effective and efficient land management.

Climate change in Indonesia causes changes in the probability of extreme wet and dry rain events. This incident is closely related to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) phenomena. Regional climate impacts of ENSO and IOD on rainfall anomalies have resulted in extreme droughts and wet and are related to soil erosion. In this study, we use remote sensing data and geographic information system (GIS) and adopt the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) to predict soil erosion and their relation to climate changes in Unda watershed, Bali, Indonesia. Several remote sensing data are used to calculate the erosivity (R), length slope (LS) factor, vegetation factor (C), and conservation practice (P) factor and combine with erodibility (K) factor from laboratory analysis. The result indicates that there are dynamics of R and C factor values from remote sensing data during El Niño in 2015, La Niña in 2016, and positive IOD in 2019. This study displays the impact of climate change on soil erosion values, especially in tropical areas where the climate is closely related with ENSO and IOD.

Agricultural systems must be altered and refocused in order to secure food security in light of the new climate change realities. This is what climate-smart agriculture (CSA) aims to do. CSA is a relatively recent concept used to define a variety of adaptation and mitigation techniques that create the technical, political and financial framework for the accomplishment of sustainable development objectives. There are seven key dimensions of CSA, which make up the three pillars of CSA. The CSA strategy includes a number of climate-smart techniques that, at the farm level, have an impact on food production, farmer incomes, resilience/adaptive capacity and climate change mitigation in farming systems of developing nations. This chapter discusses the various dimensions of climate-smart agriculture, their positive effects on agriculture sector and environment and their role in improving food security under climate change scenarios.

Agroecological typologies are indispensable for sustainable agricultural production. In recent years, agroecology has gained worldwide attention as a new holistic farming model, based on its principles. Many farmers and stakeholders in the global farming business face several obstacles when trying to switch to agroecology, such as a lack of a structured theoretical knowledge base, supportive regulations, and necessary technical equipment. To overcome the aforementioned challenges and accelerate the transition, a long-term vision backed up with indigenous knowledge as well as a joint financial effort by the states is needed. This chapter comprehensively documents existing rice agroecological typologies. We reviewed published papers on rice cropping systems, including articles, theses, reports, journal papers, and other relevant publications. Our findings consolidate a broad range of well-defined effective evidence of agroecological typologies for adoption within the rice farming communities. They include integrated rice–animal farming, the system of rice intensification, organic manure, crop rotation systems, rice polycultures, and pest management. Prior to upscaling, it is necessary to evaluate the typologies on a site-specific basis in rice growing regions, as agroecology emphasizes the importance of tailoring practices to individual sites in order to achieve optimal results. This chapter is relevant not only to food system actors but also to researchers and social activists.

The various impacts of global climate change are often faced by the farmers. Flood, drought, and pest and disease infestations are among the natural farm risks caused by such uncontrolled climate fluctuations. Agricultural damage due to natural disasters triggered by the climatic change is a big loss for small-scale farmers. Therefore, policy initiatives to respond to such situations are necessary and agricultural insurance schemes are appropriate to these conditions. Food crops insurance scheme can be prioritized for farmer’s protection and food security, while other crops will also be insured to maintain production sustainability and improve farmers’ welfare. Indonesia’s experience in crop insurance is described where policy alternatives can enforce agricultural protection programs. The results of the study reveal that socialization, promotion, and advocacy are highly recommended before and during the implementation of insurance schemes. The application of technology is encouraged to strengthen insurance schemes and efforts to increase the capacity of farmers are suggested to improve agricultural performance.

Climate change is the biggest environmental problem the world is now facing. Climate change is a powerless force that affects all world sectors and societies. However, the most vulnerable people are those who live in underdeveloped countries with few resources and in industries like agriculture that depend heavily on the weather. Even though Rajasthan, India’s largest state, is home to numerous significant minerals and serves as a museum of minerals, it lacks fundamental resources like fertile soil or arable land and water supplies. Due to a lack of the resources needed to succeed in agriculture, the state’s agriculture was primarily subsistence-based. But with modern technology, irrigation canals, and land-improvement initiatives, the state has improved agricultural productivity recently. The difficulty of climate variability now threatens Rajasthan’s agricultural growth. Planning must be given top priority in order to maintain Rajasthan’s agriculture developing at its current rate, and the most susceptible areas require immediate planning intervention. The goal of the current study is to use and assess moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) time series for agricultural crop area monitoring across the state of Rajasthan. A region’s climatic circumstances disrupt the agricultural cropping pattern, which lowers crop productivity. Numerous meteorological variables, including rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind speed, and length of daylight, have a significant impact on the cropping pattern. The most significant factors affecting agriculture are, by far, yearly rainfall and its distribution throughout the year, as well as the patterns of diurnal and annual temperatures. The study’s conclusion is land use/land cover (LULC) classification using NDVI pictures reveals that the northeast, eastern, southeast, and southwest portions of the research area are most influenced by Kharif and Double Cropping. On the map, Rabi crop covers fewer areas. In addition, we can see that the north-eastern and central regions of the study area were dominated by the years 2014–15, 2015–16, and 2016–2017. From 2011 through 2022, this classification demonstrates a lovely agricultural dynamic. Therefore, Rajasthan State is ideal for double cropping and Kharif. Rainfall and crop yield for the Rabi crop have a weak association, while rainfall and crop yield for the Kharif crop have a strong link.

Drone technology has emerged as a transformative tool in various industries, offering unparalleled capabilities for data capturing and analysis. This paper explores the evolution and current state of drone technology in the context of data-capturing applications. By utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), data acquisition processes have been revolutionized, presenting new opportunities, and challenges across sectors. The chapter presents a comprehensive review of the diverse data-capturing methods facilitated by drones, including aerial imaging, LiDAR scanning, multispectral and thermal sensors, and more. It delves into the advantages of using drones for data acquisition, such as cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and the ability to access difficult-to-reach areas. Moreover, the abstract discusses the potential drawbacks of drone-based data capturing, including regulatory hurdles, privacy concerns, and technical limitations. Furthermore, this paper highlights the implications of drone technology in specific industries like agriculture, environmental monitoring, infrastructure inspection, and disaster response. It showcases how drones have optimized data-capturing processes, leading to improved decision-making, enhanced safety, and increased efficiency in various applications. The chapter also concludes with an outlook on the future of drone technology in data capturing, exploring emerging trends such as AI-driven data analytics, swarming drones, and improved autonomy. By shedding light on the current state and potential developments, this chapter aims to inspire researchers, policymakers, and industry professionals to harness the full potential of drone technology for data-capturing applications.

Conventional farming is resource exhaustive and the culprit of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and soil degradation. Renovating conventional farming to conservation agriculture by tipping the scales in favour of carbon inputs compared to carbon outputs, systems based on minimal tillage, residue recycling, and crop variety for resource conservation and sustainable agriculture enhance soil carbon regeneration and offer mitigation to GHG emissions. This chapter highlights the critical practices and customized approaches for different principles of CA for different agro-ecologies and climates. This synthesis aims to identify the key drivers and indicators of renovation from conventional farming to conservation agriculture systems that improve system productivity, resource use efficiency, profitability and reducing environmental footprints. Networking and linkages of diverse players and stakeholders to develop a roadmap holistically with strategies and framework for adoption and scaling to targeted geographies through various schemes and policies should be emphasized. Transitioning requires handholding and capacity building of the farmers to drive the change for sustainable agriculture in rice-based agro-ecologies of Indo-Gangetic plains of India, as these practices are knowledge intensive.