Climate change challenges for agriculture and agrobusiness development

Environmental changes, e.g., melting glaciers, more precipitation, extreme weather events and shifting seasons have considerably altered our planet, generating events such as climate change and loss of biodiversity that, combined with the consequences of continuous economic growth, e.g., population growth, indiscriminate use of natural resources, pollution, led to a common understanding that society’s development is no longer sustainable and changes are needed to ensure the future of next generations [3] [12].

Agriculture is extremely vulnerable to climate change [12] and although rural areas make a unique and important contribution to the world’s economy, they face additional challenges such as declining and aging population, less access to job opportunities, and deficient transport and energy infrastructures [10], meaning that rural areas are usually less equipped than urban areas to address the challenges of climate change.

Climate change impacts on agriculture include [12] [15]:

• Slowed productivity, altered production timeline, limited land availability, and increased pressure on limited resources (soil, water, and air): disruptions in a farming cycle are becoming frequent due to floods, droughts, or extreme cold, depending on the agricultural areas’ location. Crops are reduced and harvest stability is compromised – as different crops have different responses to climate changes –, with long-term production declines, forcing chemical inputs to compensate for losses due to pests, weeds, and diseases. In addition, intensive land management also contributes to the degradation of soil, water, and air. Current agricultural areas are, thus, expected to become unsuitable for crops, which combined with extreme temperatures and weather, force agropreneurs to move and seek new arable lands.
• Threatened livelihood of agropreneurs, food security and decreased nutrition: the resulting impacts of the biological effects of climate change on crops include instability in food availability, nutrition, and prices. Firstly, countries may identify diverse ways of addressing these problems and, secondly, agropreneurs face their own adaptation process, which might result into disproportional solutions across the globe. Farming can be entirely abandoned if production costs, e.g., additional labour and equipment investments are too high. Additional impacts include, at a global level, increased prices of agricultural products due to crop decline and limited land availability, and malnutrition, i.e., decrease in the number of calories availability, particularly in children, such as a substantial fall in the consumption of meat and cereals, threatening global food access and security.

These challenges are estimated to persist and agropreneurs are expected to be more initiative-taking identifying long-term sustainable solutions at market, policy, science & technology, and land management levels that prepare for the future while deal with present issues [14].

Agropreneurs can address climate change challenges through a climate-smart agriculture (CSA), an integrated approach for transforming and reorienting agricultural development – cropland, livestock, forests, and fisheries – under the new interlinked realities of food security and accelerating climate change [4] [20].

The most used definition is provided by the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), which defines a CSA as ‘agriculture that sustainably increases productivity, enhances resilience (adaptation), reduces/removes GHGs (mitigation) where possible, and enhances achievement of national food security and development goals’ [16]. Built on existing knowledge, technologies and principles of sustainable agriculture, CSA has an explicit focus on addressing climate change, it considers the synergies and trade-offs between productivity, adaptation, and mitigation and aims to capture new funding opportunities to close the investment gap of agropreneurs [4].

Agropreneurs can adapt and mitigate climate change challenges through a CSA approach by [4] [5] [11] [16] [20]:

• Establishing support systems to increase sustainable agricultural productivity (produce more and better food to improve nutrition security and development and support the agrobusiness income increase): agropreneurs should make sure they are in line with robust international, European, national, and regional policies to enhance their response to climate change taking into consideration a broader policy framework; by engaging with youth and the local community on agricultural development, agropreneurs expect to enhance skills and knowledge, support job creation and ensure sustainable agricultural practices while rebuilding economic opportunities; agropreneurs should also consider applying to financial support from public or private institutions, so as to shift to affordable sustainable farming practices.
• Adapting and enhancing resilience of agricultural and food security systems to climate change at multiple levels, by defining concrete strategies to respond to climate change, that may range from farm-level practices to more high-level technological advancements; by adopting agroecology, i.e., the application of ecological principles to agriculture (e.g., cover crops, minimising tillage, nutrient management), agroforestry, and crop diversification, in-farm principles that have high potential to strengthen climate change resilience; and by managing (e.g., managing irrigation and nutrient runoff, soil health management) monitoring and measuring (e.g., remote sensing, satellites, better modelling for forecasting, agropreneurs easier access to information) the environmental impact on agriculture for sustainable crop production and operations improvement. All these strategies and tools will help agropreneurs reduce vulnerability to drought, pests, diseases and other climate-related risks and shocks and improve their capacity to adapt and grow in the face of adversities.
• Reducing GHG emissions from agriculture (including crops, livestock, and fisheries), i.e., pursuing lower emissions for each calorie or kilo of food produced by introducing carbon farming mechanisms (e.g., European Commission’s carbon calculator for assessing a farm’s carbon footprint, recommend mitigation options for GHG emissions reduction and provide certification of low-carbon farming), avoiding deforestation from agriculture (e.g., sustainable management of forests, conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks) and managing soils and trees in ways that maximise their potential to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.