Navigating the Climate Change Challenge: Harnessing Climate-smart Agriculture for a Sustainable Future

Abstract

Climate change has become one of the most consequential pressures on global agricultural systems, threatening crop and livestock productivity, rural livelihoods, and food security across regions of differing development status. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has been advanced over the past decade as an integrative framework intended to reconcile three frequently competing objectives: sustainably raising agricultural productivity and incomes, strengthening the adaptive capacity and resilience of farming systems, and reducing or removing greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production wherever feasible. This critical review synthesises recent peer-reviewed evidence on the conceptual foundations, technical practices, adoption determinants, institutional architecture, and regional manifestations of climate-smart agriculture. It traces how climate variability and long-term warming are altering crop yields, water availability, pest and disease dynamics, and livestock productivity, and examines how practices such as conservation agriculture, agroforestry, climate-smart irrigation, crop diversification, climate-resilient cultivars, precision and digital technologies, and improved livestock management contribute to adaptation and mitigation outcomes. Particular attention is given to the socioeconomic and institutional determinants that shape uptake among smallholder farmers, including credit access, land tenure, extension services, gender relations, and the role of indigenous and local knowledge systems. The review further considers the international policy and financing architecture surrounding CSA, the persistent gap between adaptation finance commitments and realised flows, and the unevenness of regional experience, with particular reference to sub-Saharan Africa and South and South-East Asia. Throughout, it engages critically with conceptual ambiguities and equity concerns that have been raised regarding the climate-smart agriculture paradigm, including concerns about insufficient attention to structural inequality and the political economy of agricultural transformation. The review concludes that climate-smart agriculture offers a useful, if imperfect, organising framework for agricultural adaptation and mitigation, whose practical value depends heavily on context-specific institutional support, financing, and attention to distributional consequences, rather than on the diffusion of any single technological package.