CLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE
IAI combats food insecurity and climate change through Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA). CSA empowers farmers, especially in vulnerable areas, to achieve "triple wins": more food, stronger farms, and less greenhouse gas. IAI's team works with communities to implement practices like using resilient crops and managing water efficiently. These practices lead to increased food production, improved nutrition, and greater resilience to climate challenges. By promoting CSA, IAI helps communities achieve food security and a sustainable future.
Climate-smart agriculture helps grows more food with less emissions, while building resilience for farmers.
Climate smart agriculture
Climate change and food and nutrition insecurity pose two of the greatest development challenges of our time and yet a more sustainable food system can not only heal the planet, but ensure food security for all. IAI works on an integrated approach to managing landscapes—cropland, livestock, forests and fisheries–that address the interlinked challenges of food security and climate change. CSA is a set of agricultural practices and technologies which simultaneously boost productivity, enhance resilience, and reduce Green House Gases (GHG) emissions. Although it is built on existing agricultural knowledge, technologies, and sustainability principles, IAI has adopted this approach because it is distinct in various ways. First, it has an explicit focus on addressing climate change in the agrifood system. Second, CSA systematically considers the synergies and tradeoffs that exist between productivity, adaptation, and mitigation. And third, CSA encompasses a range of practices and technologies that are tailored to specific agro-ecological conditions and socio-economic contexts including the adoption of climate-resilient crop varieties, conservation agriculture techniques, agroforestry, precision farming, water management strategies, and improved livestock management. By implementing these practices, triple win results can be achieved:
Increased productivity:
Produce more and higher quality food without putting an additional strain on natural resources, to improve nutrition security and boost incomes, especially for 75 percent (Climate-Smart Agriculture, n.d.), of the world’s poor who live in rural areas and mainly rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.
Enhanced resilience:
Reduce vulnerability to droughts, pests, diseases and other climaterelated risks and shocks; and improve the capacity to adapt and grow in the face of longerterm stresses like increased seasonal variability and more erratic weather patterns.
Reduced emissions:
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions of the food system, avoid deforestation due to cropland expansion, and increase the carbon sequestration of plants and soils.
