Enabling Environment for Climate-Smart Agriculture: A Critical Review of Climate Smart Practices from South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa

In South Asian and Sub-Saharan African nations, climate change offers numerous hurdles to growth and development. These regions are susceptible to climate change due to their vast population reliance on agriculture, high demand for natural resources, and comparatively limited strategies for coping. Reduced food grain yields, crop losses, feed scarcity, lack of potable water for livestock during the summer, forceful animal migrations, and severe losses in the poultry and fishery industries have all been documented, posing a threat to the lives of the rural poor. As global food security and agricultural productivity become increasingly vulnerable, the focus has shifted towards adopting climate-smart agricultural practices and techniques. The present study discussed the need to identify and prioritize regionally evolving climate-smart farming practices and the enabling environment required for CSA uptake. The popular CSA practices in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are crop rotation, cultivation of drought/flood-tolerant crops, legume intercropping, changing planting dates, rainwater harvesting, agroforestry, micro-irrigation technologies, minimum tillage, and integrated crop-livestock farming. A solid institutional structure, policy environment, infrastructure, agricultural insurance, climate information services, and gender and social inclusion provide the required enabling environment to alleviate farmer issues, lower CSA adoption obstacles, and improve operational sustainability. Highlights of the study are: This study examines how climate-smart farming practices are evolving in South Asia and SubSaharan Africa. We used a systematic approach to categorize and characterize agricultural adaptation alternatives to climate change. Our specific goals are to gain knowledge of the CSA adoption-enabling environments and the climate-smart agriculture practices employed in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa