Climate Smart Agriculture

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO license.

The book uses an economic lens to identify the main features of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), its likely impact, and the challenges associated with its implementation.  Drawing upon theory and concepts from agricultural development, institutional, and resource economics, this book expands and formalizes the conceptual foundations of CSA. Focusing on the adaptation/resilience dimension of CSA, the text embraces a mixture of conceptual analyses, including theory, empirical and policy analysis, and case studies, to look at adaptation and resilience through three possible avenues: ex-ante reduction of vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity, and ex-post risk coping.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section provides conceptual framing, giving an overview of the CSA concept and grounding it in core economic principles. The second section is devoted to a set of case studies illustratingthe economic basis of CSA in terms of reducing vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity and ex-post risk coping. The final section addresses policy issues related to climate change. Providing information on this new and important field in an approachable way, this book helps make sense of CSA and fills intellectual and policy gaps by defining the concept and placing it within an economic decision-making framework. This book will be of interest to agricultural, environmental, and natural resource economists, development economists, and scholars of development studies, climate change, and agriculture. It will also appeal to policy-makers, development practitioners, and members of governmental and non-governmental organizations interested in agriculture, food security and climate change.

Operationalizes CSA within the context of economic decision-making

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: A Short History of the Evolution of the Climate Smart Agriculture Approach and its Links to Climate Change and Sustainable Agriculture Debates.- Chapter 3:Economics of Climate-Smart Agriculture.- Chapter 4:  Innovation in Response to Climate Change.- Chapter 5:  Use of Satellite Information on Wetness and Temperature for Decision of Crop Yield Prediction, River Discharge and Planning.- Chapter 6:  Early Warning Techniques for Local Climate Resilience: Smallholder Rice in Lao PDE.- Chapter 7 :  Farmers' Perceptions of and Adaptations to Climate Change in Southeast Asia:  The Case Study from Thailand and Vietnam.- Chapter 8:  U.S. Maize Yield Growth and Countervailing Climate Change Impacts.- Chapter 9:  Understanding Tradeoffs in the Context of Farm-Scale Impacts:  An Application of Decision-Support Tools for Assessing Climate Smart Argiculture.- Chapter 10:  Can Insurance Help Manage Climate Risk and FoodInsecurity?: Evidence from the Pastoral Regions of East Africa.- Chapter 11:  Can Cash Transfer Programs Promote Household Resilience?: Cross-Country Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa.- Chapter 12:  Input Subsidy Programs and Climate Smart Agriculture.- Chapter 13:  Robust Decision Making for a Climate-Resilient Development of the Agricultural Sector in Nigeria.- Chapter 14:  Using AgMIP Regional Integrated Assessment Methods to Evaluate Vulnerability, Resilience and Adaptive Capacity for Climate Smart Agricultural Systems.- Chapter 15:  Climate Smart Food Supply Chains in Developing Countries in an Era of Rapid Dual Change in Agrifood Systems and the Climate.- Chapter 16:  The Adoption of Climate Smart Agriculture: The Role of Information and Insurance under Climate Change.- Chapter 17:  A Qualitative Evaluation of CSA Options in Mixed Crop-Livestock Systems in Developing Countries.- Chapter 18: Identifying Strategies to Enhance the Resilience of Smallholder Farming Systems: Evidence of Zambia.- Chapter 19:  Climate Risk Management Through Sustainable Land and Water Management in Sub-Saharan Africa.- Chapter 20:  Improving the Resilience of Central Asian Agriculture to Weather Viability and Climate Change.- Chapter 21:  Managing Environmental Risk in the Presence of Climate Change: The Role of Adaption in the Mile Basin of Ethiopia.- Chapter 22: Diversification as Part of a CSA Strategy: The Cases of Zambia and Malawi.- Chapter 23:  Economic Analysis of Improved Smallholder Paddy and Maize Production in Northern Vietnam and Implications for Climate-Smart Agriculture.- Chapter 24:  Synthesis:  Devising Effective Strategies and Policies for CSA.- Chapter 25:  Conclusions and Policy Implications.