Food and Earth Systems: Priorities for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation for Agriculture and Food Systems

Abstract

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.

Assessing the Productivity of Common Bean in Intercrop with Maize across Agro-Ecological Zones of Smallholder Farms in the Northern Highlands of Tanzania

“…Sustainable intensification of agricultural systems is important in the present and future world's food demand [1,2]. Intensification may increase food production, whereas sustainability ensures a continuous supply of food [3].…”

“…Intensification may increase food production, whereas sustainability ensures a continuous supply of food [3]. The increase in the world's population by 2050 is projected to be around 9.1 billion (34% higher than today), and food production will need to increase by 70% [2,4]. This projection indicates that more food is to be produced using less land, while other resources, including water and energy, will become the limiting factors [5].…”

Refining the Spatial Scale for Maize Crop Agro-Climatological Suitability Conditions in a Region with Complex Topography towards a Smart and Sustainable Agriculture. Case Study: Central Romania (Cluj County)

“…Even more importantly, this study could serve as a good starting point for a model developed for much larger regions affected by climate change as part of their adaptation strategy towards a smarter and more sustainable agriculture [80][81][82]. As expert-knowledge analysis was identified as the major limitation of the models [83], we consider that our results could greatly contribute to adapting an existing agro-climatic suitability model or to developing a new one at a better spatial resolution, especially for other regions with complex topography, by including a large variety of climatic (precipitation, evapotranspiration) and non-climatic (soil type, slope gradient and aspect) parameters (overlapping more layers), in order to avoid growing season constraints and to determine phenophase-specific climate sensitivities [28,[84][85][86][87], as well as to achieve realistic site-specific results and a higher efficiency of resource use in agricultural ecosystems [88,89].…”

Advancing the Role of Food Processing for Improved Integration in Sustainable Food Chains

“…This requires integration of rural sectors and better connectivity to the cities, while creating opportunities for economic development, employment, and rural food security. The science-based development of urban ecological systems needs attention especially for climate change adaptation (63).…”