Assessing the Case for Climate Smart Agriculture: A Systematic Review.

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has been driven into development dialogues in hopes of delivering improved food security, mitigation of greenhouse gases, and resilience of agricultural systems to future climate change. However, practices are often recommended as CSA, in haste, without review of the evidence base. Our objective was to establish the baseline of information for practices considered to be ‘climate-smart’ in developing countries. We specifically addressed the question “How do the most common farm-level CSA management practices/technologies affect food production, resilience/adaptive capacity, and mitigation in farming systems of the developing world”. We conducted a systematic review of peer-reviewed articles on the effects of 67 farm-level management practices on 22 indicators consistent with CSA outcomes. Our search produced 144,567 possible articles matching our criteria. After screening of titles, abstracts, and full-text, 6,741 papers met our inclusion criteria. Data are being extracted from these articles and incorporated into a publicly available web-database. Mapping of the available data indicates variable impacts of selected practices on the CSA outcomes from research clustered in relatively highly oversampled areas of the world. These findings indicate a need for multi-criteria research from less studied agroecologies to fill localized knowledge gaps. This assessment, the most extensive agricultural meta-analysis to date, highlights the large knowledge gaps still remaining for CSA that must be addressed to support effective scaling-up and achievement of desired outcomes including reaching 500 million smallholder farming households.