Agricultural sustainability under emerging climatic variability: the role of climate-smart agriculture and relevant policies in India

Global demand for agricultural products continues to grow while production resources are diminishing. Increasing climatic variability poses further challenges. Therefore, ensuring agricultural sustainability necessitates a transformation of the production system to make it more productive, inputefficient and to lower the environmental footprint. Such a transformation requires system-wide actions and considerable changes in governance, policies, and institutions. On this pretext, we examined if existing climate-smart agriculture (CSA) can enhance adaptation to and mitigation of climate change and overall food security in India. We found that CSA can substantially contribute towards climate change adaptation, mitigation, and food security. Mainstreaming CSA practices into development planning through CSVs would create mutual benefits by generating evidences based on CSAs at local level, thereby contributing to the design of local adaptation plans of action (LAPA) and further feed information into state and national action plans on climate change. Thus, we propose to mainstream CSA into development planning.