This brief explores several adaptive agricultural practices from around the world to fulfill current and future agricultural demands for food security due to the challenges posed by climate change and growing global population. Readers will discover how farmers adapt to environmental changes by adopting various agronomic practices at crop, farm and landscape levels. Particular attention is given to systemic and transformational adaptation strategies employed by farmers such as mulching, organic farming and crop diversification. This is a highly informative and carefully presented book that provides insights on how crops can build up resilience against periods of drought, high salinity, disasters such as floods, and diseases. The policy implications and future prospects of these adaptation strategies are also addressed. Environmental and plant scientists, agronomists and researchers in climate sciences will find this book interesting.

This brief explores several adaptive agricultural practices from around the world to fulfill current and future agricultural demands for food security due to the challenges posed by climate change and growing global population. Readers will discover how farmers adapt to environmental changes by adopting various agronomic practices at crop, farm and landscape levels. Particular attention is given to systemic and transformational adaptation strategies employed by farmers such as mulching, organic farming and crop diversification. This is a highly informative and carefully presented book that provides insights on how crops can build up resilience against periods of drought, high salinity, disasters such as floods, and diseases. The policy implications and future prospects of these adaptation strategies are also addressed. Environmental and plant scientists, agronomists and researchers in climate sciences will find this book interesting.

A move towards more flexible, sustainable agricultural practices is increasingly being seen as the way to address or avoid environmental and economic problems associated with existing, predominantly intensive, farming systems. Through case studies taken from around the world, this book examines the implications of adopting more ecologically sound agricultural practices, both at the level of individual farmers and at the level of larger-scale agro-ecosystems such as water catchments. The emphasis of the book is on human and social aspects, rather than on agronomic or economic considerations, focusing on the learning processes necessary for change to be implemented and, in turn, on the facilitation of that learning through participatory approaches and appropriate institutional support and policy structure.

Drawing on concepts in political economy, political ecology, justice theory, and critical development studies, the authors offer the first comprehensive, systematic exploration of the ways in which adaptation projects can produce unintended, undesirable results. This work is on the Global Policy: Next Generation list of six key books for understanding the politics of global climate change.

The Anthropocene, the time of humans. Never has human influence on the functioning of the planet been greater or in more urgent need of mitigation. Climate change, the accelerated warming of the planet’s surface attributed to human activities, is now at the forefront of global politics. The agriculture sector not only contributes to climate change but also feels the severity of its effects, with the water, carbon and nitrogen cycles all subject to modification as a result. Crop production systems are each subject to different types of threat and levels of threat intensity. There is however significant potential to both adapt to and mitigate climate change within the agricultural sector and reduce these threats. Each solution must be implemented in a sustainable manner and tailored to individual regions and farming systems. This Special Issue evaluates a variety of potential climate change adaptation and mitigation techniques that account for this spatial variation, including modification to cropping systems, Climate-Smart Agriculture and the development and growth of novel crops and crop varieties.

Roughly a billion people around the world continue to live in state of chronic hunger and food insecurity. Unfortunately, efforts to improve their livelihoods must now unfold in the context of a rapidly changing climate, in which warming temperatures and changing rainfall regimes could threaten the basic productivity of the agricultural systems on which most of the world’s poor directly depend. But whether climate change represents a minor impediment or an existential threat to development is an area of substantial controversy, with different conclusions wrought from different methodologies and based on different data. This book aims to resolve some of the controversy by exploring and comparing the different methodologies and data that scientists use to understand climate’s effects on food security. In explains the nature of the climate threat, the ways in which crops and farmers might respond, and the potential role for public and private investment to help agriculture adapt to a warmer world. This broader understanding should prove useful to both scientists charged with quantifying climate threats, and policy-makers responsible for crucial decisions about how to respond. The book is especially suitable as a companion to an interdisciplinary undergraduate or graduate level class.

The book focuses in detail on learning and adapting through partnerships between managers, scientists, and other stakeholders who learn together how to create and maintain sustainable resource systems. As natural areas shrink and fragment, our ability to sustain economic growth and safeguard biological diversity and ecological integrity is increasingly being put to the test. In attempting to meet this unprecedented challenge, adaptive management is becoming a viable alternative for broader application. Adaptive management is an iterative decision-making process which is both operationally and conceptually simple and which incorporates users to acknowledge and account for uncertainty, and sustain an operating environment that promotes its reduction through careful planning, evaluation, and learning until the desired results are achieved. This multifaceted approach requires clearly defined management objectives to guide decisions about what actions to take, and explicit assumptions about expected outcomes to compare against actual outcomes. In this edited book, we address the issue by pursuing a holistic and systematic approach that utilizes natural resources to reap sustainable environmental, economic and social benefits for adaptive management, helping to ensure that relationships between land, water and plants are managed in ways that mimic nature.