Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) is a comprehensive strategy for managing crops, livestock, forests, and fisheries that seeks to respond to climate change while guaranteeing food security. It has three main goals: improving agricultural productivity, improving resilience and adaptation to climate change, and minimizing greenhouse gas emissions where it is feasible.
CSA encourages practices like drought-tolerant crop varieties, low-pressure irrigation methods, agroforestry, conservation tillage, and integrated pest management. These improve yields while enabling farmers to cope with unpredictable weather patterns, temperatures, and changing rainfall. Livelihood diversification and climate risk insurance are also major elements of CSA, particularly for poor smallholder farmers.
In India, CSA is essential to support sustainable development objectives due to the nation’s heavy reliance on agriculture and susceptibility to climate hazards such as droughts, floods, and heatwaves. Efforts by the Indian government and research centers are facilitating climate-resilient technologies, weather-based advisories, and climate-smart villages.
Through the integration of science, technology, and indigenous knowledge, CSA provides a pragmatic path to creating a robust farm system. It is crucial in attaining long-term sustainability, environmental protection, and rural livelihood security in a climate change world.