Climate-smart Agriculture

Climate-smart Agriculture

The current global situation with regards to climate change and agriculture inefficiency is getting from bad to worse. We will reach great food insecurity if we do not change our current lifestyle and approaches. Therefore, a new approach has been created to help in solving the agricultural issue. It is called Climate-smart agriculture. When looking at its name and the current global issue, my team and I defined it during the class as: An adapting approach that insures sustainable increasing agriculture through the resilience to climate change.

Actions

In order to achieve the objective of this new and costly approach, various actions need to be done.

- Efficient land use; to achieve sustainable increasing production
- Innovation to increase productivity; this can be done by using drought-resistant corps. Since drought is the principal constraint of crop production in drylands where the majority of the poor depend on agriculture.
- Adapt to population growth; as the current increase in population growth threatens food security and at some point the production of land will not be enough to feed all these people.
- Remove greenhouse gases; this is a vey essential, but challenging, action. Greenhouse gases are continuously increasing in the Earth's atmosphere due to several reasons mentioned in previous blogs. Removing these gases requires a lot of knowledge, innovation as well as investments and policies.
- Adaption to climate change; finding solutions to the depletion of water to minimize the danger of global warming.
- Sustainable water supply; only part of the water used for irrigation is used efficiently, the rest of the water is lost for the crops on the fields that were to be irrigated. As water losses in irrigation are huge, I would like to elaborate more on this topic.

Irrigation

Only 45% of water used for irrigation ends up to the corp. More than the half (55%) of this water is lost. There are several types of water losses.

* Distribution losses; which counts for 15 of the water used.

* Field application losses; which counts for 25% of the water used

* Conveyance losses; which counts for 15% of the water used and it represents the losses of water during transportation in canals.

These percentages are very high. Bare in mind that 67% of all water used in the world goes for agriculture, from which 55% is lost or inefficiently used.

Therefore, the current irrigation methods have to be changed. The table below shows the different in efficiency between different irrigation systems.

To insure higher efficiency, drip irrigation should be more applied. Drip irrigation or micro-irrigation systems are low-pressure systems with the potential to deliver water at very high efficiencies if properly designed, maintained, and managed. These systems tend to have the highest initial investment costs and management requirements compared to other types of irrigation, but can also have the highest application efficiencies and crop water productivity, especially when water is limited.

Sources:

http://www.channel.com/agronomics/Pages/Application-Efficiency-in-Irrigation.aspx

http://www.fao.org/docrep/t7202e/t7202e08.htm