ABSTRACT. Increasing weather risks threaten agricultural production systems and food security across the world. Maintaining agricultural growth while minimizing climate shocks is crucial to building a resilient food production system and meeting developmental goals in vulnerable countries. Experts have proposed several technological, institutional, and policy interventions to help farmers adapt to current and future weather variability and to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper presents the climate-smart village (CSV) approach as a means of performing agricultural research for development that robustly tests technological and institutional options for dealing with climatic variability and climate change in agriculture using participatory methods. It aims to scale up and scale out the appropriate options and draw out lessons for policy makers from local to global levels. The approach incorporates evaluation of climate-smart technologies, practices, services, and processes relevant to local climatic risk management and identifies opportunities for maximizing adaptation gains from synergies across different interventions and recognizing potential maladaptation and trade-offs. It ensures that these are aligned with local knowledge and link into development plans. This paper describes early results in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to illustrate different examples of the CSV approach in diverse agroecological settings. Results from initial studies indicate that the CSV approach has a high potential for scaling out promising climate-smart agricultural technologies, practices, and services. Climate analog studies indicate that the lessons learned at the CSV sites would be relevant to adaptation planning in a large part of global agricultural land even under scenarios of climate change. Key barriers and opportunities for further work are also discussed.

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Human activities and their relation with land, through agriculture and forestry, are significantly impacting Earth system functioning. Specifically, agriculture has increasingly become a key sector for adaptation and mitigation initiatives that address climate change and help ensure food security for a growing global population. Climate change and agricultural outcomes influence our ability to reach targets for at least seven of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. By 2015, 103 nations had committed themselves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, while 102 countries had prioritized agriculture in their adaptation agenda. Adaptation and mitigation actions within agriculture still receive insufficient support across scales, from local to international level. This paper reviews a series of climate change adaptation and mitigation options that can support increased production, production efficiency and greater food security for 9 billion people by 2050. Climate-smart agriculture can help foster synergies between productivity, adaptation, and mitigation, although trade-offs may be equally apparent. This study highlights the importance of identifying and exploiting those synergies in the context of Nationally Determined Contributions. Finally, the paper points out that keeping global warming to 2 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 requires going beyond the agriculture sector and exploring possibilities with respect to reduced emissions from deforestation, food loss, and waste, as well as from rethinking human diets.

We dedicate this special issue to the memory of Daniel Martino, a generous leader in greenhouse gas quantification and accounting from agriculture, land-use change, and forestry.

Anthropogenic soils of the Amazon Basin (Terra Preta, Terra Mulata) reveal that pre-Colombian peoples made lasting improvements in the agricultural potential of nutrient-poor soils. Some have argued that applying similar techniques could improve OPEN ACCESSForests 2012, 3 208 agriculture over much of the humid tropics, enhancing local livelihoods and food security, while also sequestering large quantities of carbon to mitigate climate change. Here, we present preliminary evidence for Anthropogenic Dark Earths (ADEs) in tropical Asia. Our surveys in East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) identified several sites where soils possess an anthropogenic development and context similar in several respects to the Amazon's ADEs. Similarities include riverside locations, presence of useful fruit trees, spatial extent as well as soil characteristics such as dark color, high carbon content (in some cases), high phosphorus levels, and improved apparent fertility in comparison to neighboring soils. Local people value these soils for cultivation but are unaware of their origins. We discuss these soils in the context of local history and land-use and identify numerous unknowns.Incomplete biomass burning appears key to these modified soils. More study is required to clarify soil transformations in Borneo and to determine under what circumstances such soil improvements might remain ongoing.

This chapter reviews evidence of the impacts of agroecological farming practices on climate adaptation and mitigation. Farm diversification has the strongest evidence for its impacts on climate change adaptation. The evidence for agroecology’s impact on mitigation in LMICs is modest and emphasises carbon sequestration in soil and biomass. Agroforestry has the strongest body of evidence for impacts on mitigation. Locally relevant solutions produced through participatory processes and the co-creation of knowledge with farmers has improved climate change adaptation and mitigation. Knowledge gaps were found in regard to agricultural climate change mitigation, resilience to extreme weather, and agroecology approaches involving livestock, landscape redesign and multi-scalar analysis. There is a need to assess the performance of agricultural development using an outcome-based approach based on agroecological principles and climate change adaptation and mitigation indicators in order to guide donor and national investment. Moreover, direct investment and the scaling of practices for which the current evidence is strongest are needed. These include: (1) agricultural diversification, agroforestry and local adaptation; (2) increase action around resilience to extreme weather and climate change mitigation outcomes in LMICs and build the capacity of policymakers, scientists and institutions from the global South to work on these issues; and (3) compare the cost-effectiveness and outcomes of agroecology approaches with other agricultural development interventions at multiple scales, including the valuation of environmental and social benefits to better evaluate alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture.

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