Climate-smart Agriculture: A Pathway to Food Security and Climate Resilience- A Review

Agricultural intensification is crucial for meeting the demands of a growing population and ensuring food availability, but it also poses significant environmental challenges. Unsustainable agriculture practices, such as conventional tillage, soil erosion, chemical misapplication and overuse of irrigation, can lead to soil degradation, water wastage, and a declining water table. These environmental consequences increase the sensitivity of farm systems to climate variability and encourage the transition to sustainability practices. Climate resilient agriculture (CRA) addresses these issues by focusing on conserving and optimizing soil resources through methods like conservation tillage, crop rotation, cover cropping and precision irrigation. CRA also promotes biodiversity, remote sensing technologies and data driven farming. The article emphasizes the importance of a system approach in CRA, considering soils, water, and biodiversity as building blocks in agroecosystems with resilience. This approach counters the harmful effects of current agricultural activities against nature, thereby enabling sustainable food production and mitigating the negative effects of climate change. A comprehensive road map for agriculture development is provided to become eco-friendly and climate-resilient. In the following article, the environmental consequences of unsustainable agricultural practices are systematically reviewed highlighting the need for CRA as a sustainable pathway to address these challenges and enhance resilience to climate-related impacts.