Climate Smart Agriculture for Reduction and Mitigation of Green House Gas Emission

Abstract

Agriculture is related to food security on this planet. The productivity is being adversely affected by the climate change which is the result of global warming. Global warming is the result of emission of greenhouse gases due to anthropogenic activity. Among these, Agriculture also contributes significantly to the emission of greenhouse gases. The agricultural activity may be dry farming, irrigation farming or water-logged farming like rice cultivation that emit greenhouse gases from soil. The main reason is unsustainable agricultural management practices in developing countries, not adapting to changing climatic and weather conditions to maintain its productivity. To cover these aspects and to approach towards sustainable agriculture, more efforts are required, not compromising the global efforts to ensure food security for all.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is a programme of the United Nations (UN) which is working towards promoting technologies for mitigation of global warming. Among different technologies advocated for this purpose, agriculture is a unique activity, which on one hand is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, on the contrary adoption of specific agricultural technology has the potential to reduce and mitigate the greenhouse gases emission. UNEP (2012) has summarised, especially for developing countries, well researched agricultural technologies for adaptation of agriculture to the changing climate conditions for improving its productivity, as well as contributing to the reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases, thus attaining sustainable agricultural development. Alternatively this is termed as Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA). The CSA is an approach for transforming and reorienting agricultural production systems and food value chains so that they support sustainable development and can ensure food security under climate change. Some of the prominent methods of Climate Smart agriculture are discussed in this paper with the hope of its wide acceptance in India.