Dear Dr. Duttarganvi,

Mixed crop-livestock farms can be a sustainable production under this context.

Regards,

Alfredo J. Escribano.

Dear Dr. Duttarganvi,

Mixed crop-livestock farms can be a sustainable production under this context.

Regards,

Alfredo J. Escribano.

Mixed crop - live stock - fisheries could be one way for sustainable production.

Shading is important. First and foremost it is important to choose the right trees and crops under the circumstances. Wageningen University and Research is very much engaged in food security. See website www.wageningenur.nl Salinity problems should be addressed if any.

See also a new Springer book on climate change in Bangladesh

Md Nazrul Islam and Andre van Amstel 2015 Bangladesh I: Climate Change Impacts, Mitigation and Adaptation in Developing Countries

Protective farming is recommended e.g shading.

Many of the previous answers can be described as climate smart agriculture or CSA. Please see https://ccafs.cgiar.org/climate-smart-agriculture-0#.VqdysIXhCHs for a good overview. In short, these are climate-sensitive practices that have been locally contextualized. CSA may be characterized as practices for adaptation and practices for mitigation. Likewise, CSA often considers collective as well as individual action, and engagement in the policy process. An interesting and related project: https://github.com/CCAFS/csa_compendium

Agroecological approaches taken to develop processes relevant to climate change mitigation. The crop productivity in drylands is limited largely by the availability of water in the soil. The percentage of organic matter content of the soil is a reliable index of crop productivity in semiarid regions because organic matter improves the soil's ability to store and transmit air and water.

Add large amounts of organic matter on a regular basis is another key strategy used by many farmers. The management of organic matter is central to all efforts to create healthy land with good biological activity and positive physical and chemical characteristics.

Organic matter improves soil water retention, making it more resistant to drought and improving infiltration capacity, preventing its particles are transported with water during heavy rains. Organic matter also improves aggregation of the soil surface, by firmly grasping the particles when rain or wind storms.

Soil protection against erosion is also a key strategy to build resilience. Mulching or mulching and green manures offer many advantages. Stubble mulching slow down the drying process to protect the soil surface residues.

Likewise, the use of biodiversity will be crucial, and the most diverse plant communities better resist disturbances and are more resilient to environmental perturbations arising face of extreme weather events. Undoubtedly, crop diversification is a long-term strategy for farmers experiencing erratic weather. The use of diversification within farming systems can greatly reduce the vulnerability of production systems while protecting rural farmers and agricultural production.

Farmers using diversity as a strategy for crop management, usually add copious amounts of organic matter to their soils, further increasing its ability to retain water. Managing cover crops and green manures improves the soil cover protecting it from erosion, but also adds biomass, which in turn contributes to a higher level of organic matter in the soil.

Another important aspect is the development of strategies to increase ecological resilience of farming systems together with mechanisms favorezan or strengthen social resilience, defined as the ability of groups or communities to adapt against cuasa external stressors, whether social, political or environmental, must go hand in hand with ecological resilience.

To be resilient, rural societies must demonstrate the ability to buffer disturbance with agro-ecological methods adopted and disseminated through self-organization and collective action. Reducing social vulnerability through the extension and consolidation of social networks, both local and regional level, can contribute to building resilience in agro-ecosystems.

the adoption of concepts under climate-smart and sustainable agriculture is advised for small scale farmers to adapt to climate change and mitigate its impact on their livelihoods.

These can range from using stress-resistant crop varieties to increasing water use efficiency to mixed farming - depending on the actual context.

Dear Dr. Duttarganvi,

Climate change is indeed perhaps one of the major challenges facing the world today. In the recent past, the concept of Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) has gained alot of interest among governments, development partners as well as policy makers. The idea, first championed in 2010 at the first Global Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change at The Hague, is composed of three main pillars: sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes; adapting and building resilience to climate change; and, reducing and/or removing greenhouse gas emissions. For more information, kindly refer to the following link provided on the World Agroforestry web page. Thanks and I wish you success.

Kind regards,

Dennis Olila

http://worldagroforestry.org/newsroom/media_coverage/challenges-upscaling-climate-smart-agriculture

Dear Dr. Duttarganvi,

I agree with A. J. Escribano comments that "mixed crop-livestock farms can be a sustainable production under this context". The coastal farmers of Bangladesh already are practicing this systems. We did a comparative research on sustainability of this agricultural systems (mixed crop-fish-vegetable and livestock) with others conventional agricultural systems. Please find the result at "Talukder, B., Saifuzzaman, M., & vanLoon, G. W. (2015). Sustainability of agricultural systems in the coastal zone of Bangladesh. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 1-18 (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9704750&fileId=S1742170515000095).

Kind regards,

Byomkesh Talukder  

Community based adaptation strategies could help small and marginal farmers for resilience to climate change. Please see my following article:

Ahmed, N., S.W. Bunting, S. Rahman and C.J. Garforth. 2014. Community-based climate change adaptation strategies for integrated prawn-fish-rice farming in Bangladesh to promote social-ecological resilience. Reviews in Aquaculture (Wiley Publisher), 6(1): 20–35.

Marginal farmers no doubt have got practices that have sufficiently seen them through their natural dry conditions. Improving these practices and introducing more Good Agricultural Practices that are 'Climate smart' as previously stated by other contributors in line with agroecological principles has got so much merit. However, changing practices by smallholders have been increasingly found to be difficult. Hence, the need to incentivize farmers to change non-productive practices.

Dear Dr. Duttarganvi,

case studies for Indonesia are in the attached book and paper.

Best regards, Prof. Kees Stigter 

I should have added the source of the book chapter, the second reference above:

Yunita T. Winarto and Kees Stigter, 2016.

Incremental learning and gradual changes: "Science Field Shops" as an

educational approach to coping better with climate change in agriculture.

In: Lynn Wilson and Carolyn Stevenson (Eds.) Promoting Climate Change Awareness through Environmental Education.

IGI Global (Information Science Reference), Hershey, USA, 59-93.

Best wishes, Kees

Thank you all for very informative solutions for climate change.

 This question is really important, mitigation and adaptation strategies as desiged by researchers need to be disseminated to the farmers, also identifying the constraints faced for adoption, small & marginal farmers a bit tricky as difficult to convince the large masses. In south asia, may be transfer of technology is possible through effective public/private /corporate partnerships. we need to design an appropriate Decision support system for identifying regionwise suitable adaptation and mitigation strategies

thanks Dr Kees for providing nice links

regards

Dear All,

it is important that we develop these strategies together with farmers, because constraints are then solved during the design phase.

Mass movements can only be led by famers, in farmer to farmer transfer, using farmer facilitators (s)elected from among the farmers.

In such extension attempts decision support systems are improved because of the new knowledge that extension brings to farmers, also when the trained extension is established from within the farmer communities.

Best regards, Kees

Climate smart agricultural practices are the order of the day in terms of concepts to enhance farmers' adaptive capacity to climate change, but what they mean in reality to smallholder farmers (men and women) remain difficult.

Prof. Oladipo is right.

I think that we should not approach Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) as something that we still have to find out  and develop. CSA has been around for ages. I have many examples in my Applied Agrometeorology (Springer, 2010). But climates are changing and farmers have to adapt using existing knowledge on CSA from elsewhere or new CSA, either developed from old CSA knowledge or newly developed from old and newly available knowledge. That makes our chances of jointly developing successful adaptations a lot higher.

Under CSA, FAO developed a Knowledge Action Group and my Indonesian counterpart and I have agreed to be involved, that is assisting in, leading the development of a specific knowledge output in the working area "Support, services and extension for CSA". It is clear that this should be built up from a foundation of existing knowledge from which such support, services and extension have been developed earlier, improved and extended with new knowledge or with co-produced  new knowledge created by farmers together with scientists, under conditions of a changing climate. That is the way we should go, I believe.

Best regards, Kees

This good dialogue and recent contributions by Prof. Stigter point to the fact that research and practice in agriculture need to be properly synchronized, particularly in developing countries where practical demonstration are usually limited. Prof. Stigter has been leading this fight for decades but his efforts need to be upscaled by national efforts to show that CSA is part of the adaptive response by traditional small holder farmers who only need to be further supported by evidence based research outputs through extension services that are rapidly being neglected.

I just managed to download the 2011 publication by Prof. Stigter and found it enriching. Thanks for always ready to share information

Oladipo

This good dialogue and recent contributions by Prof. Stigter point to the fact that research and practice in agriculture need to be properly synchronized, particularly in developing countries where practical demonstration are usually limited. Prof. Stigter has been leading this fight for decades but his efforts need to be upscaled by national efforts to show that CSA is part of the adaptive response by traditional small holder farmers who only need to be further supported by evidence based research outputs through extension services that are rapidly being neglected.

I just managed to download the 2011 publication by Prof. Stigter and found it enriching. Thanks for always ready to share information

Oladipo

this is great and the info provided is really useful. i think conservation agriculture is also an important part of CSA.

However, recently I am witnessing a kind of competition between approaches to climate smart agriculture and adaptation, that is between ecosystem vs community based approaches. my question is can one be really successful without the other? 

I agree with this last observation and it is an unnecessary development.

 I want to go even one step further and state that successful adaptation to climate change in agriculture must really be climate smart agriculture.

 While successful climate smart agriculture must have been (i) an original traditional/indigenous agriculture that could be continued with one or more adaptations to recent climate developments or (ii) new developments obtained by recent adaptations to climate change.

Let us see whether we can illustrate this with examples. Let us not forget that we came here because of Dr. Duttarganvi’s important question on modern concepts to be adopted for changing scenarios of climate.  

I take examples from my “Applied Agrometeorology” (Springer 2010).

A successful adaptation to climate change from China was guidance on climate zoning for naval orange plantations by a County Meteorological Bureau in 2002 in Longnan. The advisory was issued to all townships, villages and other governing bodies as an adaptation to the changed climate of 2002, valid till 2010.  Heeding this zoning was climate smart agriculture for sure. 

For the other way around, the first example was reported from Africa.

(i) Trees are grown with crops in many traditional settings. Recent population developments, for example in Kenya, make it necessary to plant crops on sloping land. Climate developments have shown increasingly aggressiveness of rains. Growing contour hedgerows on such sloping lands and growing crops like maize and cowpea between them reduces water and soil run off appreciably. So this is climate smart agriculture after adapting indigenous agriculture to recently worsening climate developments. The adaptations were to grow the trees in allies on sloping land and to prune them, reducing competition and using the mulch on the soil to further reduce the run offs and increase nutrients.

The second example for illustration comes again from China.

(ii) Lotus is traditionally grown on large surfaces in Jiangxi and Henan Provinces. In the area of the example, Guangchang County, fields lay idle after lotus harvesting is over, from late September till the end of November after which winter makes any agriculture impossible. The climate smart agriculture developed here was relay planting (planting one crop while the other crop is still present) of late rice (meaning here rice that is climate wise suitable to be planted late) late in the lotus harvesting period. The climate developments here were that global warming had extended the growing season so much that starting with the relay planting this rice crop could just make it towards ripening and harvesting before winter fell.

There are very many examples in the agrometeorological and agroclimatological literature that in the above ways connect adaptation to climate change with climate smart agriculture and the other way around.

Best regards, Kees   

Climate Smart Agriculture should be adopted in which adaptation and mitigation should be focussed.

http://www.pairvi.org/Publications/NMSA%20AND%20CLIMATE%20RESILIENCE%20OF%20SMALL%20AND%20MARGINAL%20FARMERS.pdf

Climate adaptive agriculture should be pursued through an agriculture that relies more and more on agrobiodiversity (especially of plants). These plants are mainly native perennials, and shrubs and trees dominate the farming environment. The diversity of the plants community fosters the diversity of the microbial community in the soil as the biomass these decompose is diverse and with it, moisture is retained and the land boosts its productivity of goods and ecological services.

Also, it is the scale of agricultural production that must be redefined under the pressure of a changing climate and with it the economy of agriculture. In other words, to achieve the needed resiliency farming systems will have to become the focus for a local economy, rather than a global economy dominated by monocultures for few commodities to be sold and purchased across the continents.

An important consideration is ecosystem-based adaptation. Existing coping strategies to deal with climate variability, as well as new and enhanced adaptation approaches are required. Given the urgency of adaptation and often limited funding, available and cost-effective adaptation solutions are often prioritized. Ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation, or the conservation, sustainable management, and restoration of ecosystems to help people adapt to the impacts of climate change are gaining increasing attention, as they are accessible to the rural poor in developing countries and can be cost-effective. Such approaches include, for example, sustainable agriculture, integrated water resource management, and sustainable forest management interventions that use nature to reduce vulnerability to climate change. The role of ecosystems in adaptation is recognized at the international level under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

Some direct management strategies to counteract global climate change by small scale farmers should include the following:

· Conserving and stabilizing soil organic matter (SOM) content to acceptable levels, through regular applications of livestock manure, and a cultivation of cover crops, green manures, to enhance the soil water retention capability

· Employing the use of crop residues and other biomass available at the farm as mulch to decrease water loss (evaporation) from the soil

· Using more diversification strategies in the design of the farm and soil management, such as: intercalated crops, agroforestry and an employment of rotational grazing for livestock species

· Adapting water management according to soil use and topography, to avoid

· Slowing down water flow due to heavy rain precipitation through the construction of key lines leading to collection ponds where water can be stored and later used for irrigation purposes.

Adaptabilidad de especies en el ecosistema, uso eficiente y sostenible de insumos, y recurso agua. Aplicabilidad de rotación y biodiversidad de cultivos. Mantenimiento del ecosistema con buenas practicas agricolas e incorporación de Compost y microorganismos benéficos para ayudar al ciclado de nutrientes y optimizar los nutrientes de sintésis quimica.