What is Climate-Smart Agriculture?

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an integrated approach to managing landscapes—cropland, livestock, forests and fisheries–that address the interlinked challenges of food security and climate change, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and sequestering carbon.

As a project under the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, we define climate-smart commodities as an agricultural commodity that is produced using farming, ranching or forestry practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions or sequester carbon.

This approach pursues the triple objectives of sustainably increasing productivity and incomes, adapting to climate change, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions where possible.

Source: FAO, 2023.

Climate-smart agriculture aims to simultaneously achieve three outcomes:

1.    Increased productivity: Produce more and better food to improve nutrition security and boost incomes, especially of 75 percent of the world’s poor who live in rural areas and mainly rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.

2.    Enhanced resilience: Reduce vulnerability to drought, pests, diseases and other climate-related risks and shocks; and improve capacity to adapt and grow in the face of longer-term stresses like shortened seasons and erratic weather patterns.

3.    Reduced emissions: Pursue lower emissions for each calorie or kilo of food produced, avoid deforestation from agriculture and identify ways to absorb carbon out of the atmosphere.

Source: World Bank, 2021.

Through Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, USDA is delivering on the promise of positioning American agriculture as a global leader in delivering voluntary, incentives-driven, market-based climate solutions. The Alliance to Advance Climate-Smart Agriculture is proud to be one of the partnerships that will help further this goal.