Threatened by the ravages of climate change and pressured by the necessity to feed an ever – growing population, agriculture is under strain.
Facing two urgent challenges simultaneously – climate hazards and food security – requires an integrated approach. World institutions such as the World Bank and FAO have endorsed a new paradigm: Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA).
What is Climate Smart Agriculture?
Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is a unified framework that labels successful agricultural practices and technologies. Success is assessed on the capacity to:
- enhance crops’ productivity and food production
- build resilience to climate change
- mitigate greenhouse gas emissions
It is sufficient to comply with one of these to be considered climate-smart. However, if two or three are met simultaneously, the practice is regarded as potentially replicable in another context. Aware of the world’s richness in farming techniques, CSA does not prescribe any but strives to identify the good practices that concur with sustainability in agriculture.
Who should become more climate-smart? How?
CSA represents a new approach to governance. If an integrated action is necessary, different institutions must work in concert to find a multi-layered strategy. National ministries of agriculture, development and climate change must meet at the same table and propose plans that create synergies and positive feedback mechanisms in the three spheres.
Every farm can become more climate-smart with simple resource management adjustments. Rather than simple technical fixes, however, being climate smart means changing one’s posture to production. It projects agriculture into a more holistic perspective, where systemic thinking allows us to see the bigger picture.
An example: climate-smart water management
Most CSA practices derive from a systemic analysis of resource management. An example? In dry environments, water is a precious resource. Farmers must find ways to keep it on their land as much as possible. A climate-smart action could be combining the technique of water harvesting – i.e. the collection of rainwater – with a system of drip irrigation to reduce dependence on groundwater and evaporation losses. This simple adjustment can save a lot of water, making the farm more resilient to seasonal droughts and allowing for increased food production. Wise water management also saves the greenhouse emissions that would be released if a transportation company had to retail water to every farm.
EVECSA: Enhancing vocational training in sustainable agriculture
Positive feedback effects and systemic thinking are required to tackle the multiple challenges of today. By sharing innovation, good practices and technologies, world communities of farmers can learn from each other and contribute to making agriculture more durable and sustainable.
Guided by this vision, EVECSA aims to increase the educational offer of CSA in agricultural vocational education and training (agro-VET). By establishing new Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVEs), EVECSA creates spaces for the transmission of innovative knowledge in several European countries. New educational facilities that will shape the skills of today’s farmers according to the challenges that lie ahead. Sustainability and innovation will merge into a unique form, capable of responding to the three objectives of CSA.
