Climate-Smart Nutrient Management for Sustainable Crop Production and Soil Carbon Sequestration: A Critical Narrative Review

Abstract

Nutrient management sits at the intersection of two increasingly urgent objectives: sustaining crop productivity for a growing population and limiting the contribution of agriculture to climate change while enhancing the capacity of cultivated soils to store carbon. Climate-smart nutrient management has emerged as an organising concept for practices intended to raise nutrient use efficiency, curtail reactive nitrogen losses, and support soil organic carbon accrual without compromising yield. This critical narrative review examines the strength, coherence and limitations of the evidence underpinning that concept. Drawing on foundational and recent literature retrieved from multiple scholarly indexes, the review evaluates the conceptual coupling of nutrient cycling and soil carbon dynamics, the agronomic and environmental performance of nitrogen-focused efficiency strategies, the contribution of organic and integrated amendments to carbon sequestration, and the promise and constraints of precision and site-specific approaches. The available evidence indicates that enhanced-efficiency fertilisers, four-factor nutrient stewardship and improved placement can reduce nitrogen losses and, in many settings, maintain or improve yield, yet effect sizes are strongly context-dependent and long-term field confirmation remains uneven. Organic amendments and residue retention frequently increase soil organic carbon, but accrual is finite, reversible and constrained by carbon saturation, nutrient stoichiometry and prior land-use history, which qualifies optimistic sequestration targets. Persistent tensions concern the durability of stored carbon, the difference between gross and net greenhouse gas outcomes once embodied and field emissions are counted, and the transferability of results across climates and farming systems. The synthesis argues that climate-smart nutrient management is best understood not as a fixed technology set but as a locally calibrated balancing of efficiency, sequestration and resilience objectives, each supported by evidence of differing maturity. Priorities include long-term multi-site experimentation, harmonised accounting of full greenhouse gas balances, and stronger integration of biophysical and socio-economic evidence to inform credible carbon-based incentives.