A qualitative evaluation of CSA options in mixed crop-livestock systems in developing countries
This book chapter (PDF) from the book Climate Smart Agriculture published by Springer summarizes the climate smartness of different alternatives in the mixed crop-livestock systems in developing countries from both a technical and an institutional perspective. The mixed crop-livestock systems of the developing world will become increasingly important for meeting the food security challenges of the coming decades. The synergies and trade-offs between food security, adaptation, and mitigation objectives are not well studied, however. The crop and livestock management interventions included span the range of crop and grazing land management, water management, and livestock management, and include options related to food storage and processing, insurance, and use of weather information. From a technical perspective, there appear to exist no “silver bullets” for achieving climate-smart mixed systems. From an adoption perspective, a range of different constraints exist that may impede the widespread adoption of all these innovations. These may be to do with investment and/or running costs and access to technology and knowledge of how to implement it, as well as social acceptability and local governance issues. Additionally, for some of the interventions evaluated, there are significant trade-offs between meeting shorter-term food production or food security objectives and longer-term resilience objectives. These temporal trade-offs may be difficult to resolve in many local contexts, and the triple wins involving these interventions will sometimes be elusive.