The nexus of climate change, sustainable agriculture and farm livelihood: contextualizing climate smart agriculture

Climate change is an inherent and indispensable component of global development and deliberations on food security and sustainable farm livelihoods. This article attempts to highlight the key issues with regards to climate change, and propounds an approach to upscale holistic and appropriate Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA). The review addresses the climate change impact on, and intricacies of, farm livelihoods, vulnerability and adaptation strategies. Preordained holistic strategies such as CSA can curtail widespread detrimental effects of climate change on farm households, farm productivity and farm profitability through adaptation strategies. Consequently, the agricultural sector of developing countries like India is being restructured, reformed and realigned to contextualize the climate change-sustainable agriculture-farm livelihood nexus. Our exhaustive literature review exhorts a framework of how various types of CSA interventions (scientific technologies, indigenous technical knowledge, institutional innovations and information and communication technologies) can help to promote sustainable livelihood outcomes. The implementation of this approach is driven by the livelihood status of various strata of farmers, along with their vulnerability profile, resilience capacity and climate knowledge with regards to contrasting rationales of climatic vagaries. Climate change is a global process with local visibility; in countries that are dependent on an agrarian economy, a balanced mix of adaptation mechanisms to de-risk the vulnerable farm livelihoods and re-route them towards smart interventions can be important for climate-proofing agriculture. The above mentioned framework provides a robust future course of action for circumventing adverse climatic impacts.