Climate smart agriculture (CSA) as defined by the FAO aims to jointly address food security and climate challenges. It is composed of three main pillars:
- Sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and grower incomes
- Adapting and building resilience to climate change
- Reducing and/or removing greenhouse gases emissions, where possible
Crop nutrition knowledge plays an important role in promoting climate smart agriculture on all three aspects. Contrary to popular belief, high-yielding farming is an important part of the solution – and doing it smarter is the better option.
Climate smart agriculture involves using the cropland in an optimal way – ensuring high yields, while avoiding soil depletion. Also, Yara promotes doing a full life cycle assessment of the carbon footprint.
A call to action: How it’s all connected
Yara promotes climate smart agriculture on the global agenda, and we address all three elements of climate smart agriculture with research and concrete actions.
A main part of the solution is halting deforestation caused by agriculture, as this represents half the GHG emissions caused by agricultural activities.
But increasing yields while adapting to global warming also implies a need for climate smart agriculture: Higher yields must be achieved using less farmland, gaining more crops per kilo fertilizer and drop of water.
Responding to the global challenges, climate smart agriculture must improve on all aspects: smarter resource use, sustainable land use, increasing yields, reducing carbon footprints, supporting smallholder farmers’ incomes and building resilience – working through partnerships.