Abstract
Recent scholarship on agriculture has illuminated tradeoffs among social and environmental outcomes in a number of contexts, including between biodiversity and livelihoods, a variety of eco-system services, food security and resource depletion. Climate change will amplify these tensions, even as it is itself driven by emissions from agriculture. At the same time, around the world, some farming systems already function in ways that provide insights for a transformative movement towards climate-smart agriculture; farming systems that produce high yields and improve human well-being without compromising biodiversity or depleting scarce natural resources; systems that contribute to climate change mitigation through sustainable land and soil management; and that are resilient to increasing climate variability. These are Bright Spots of climate-smart agriculture hiding in plain sight. This study will use an innovative solutions-oriented multi-scale nested study design to identify and learn from such bright spots of climate-smart agriculture while capturing both large-scale patterns and interactions, as well as local particularities and the high context-dependency of socio-ecological systems. The study will focus on the Netherlands and the state of Punjab in India – two regions that represent similar agricultural systems with export-oriented intensive high-input agriculture with high yields, high food surpluses, and stark tensions between environmental and socio-economic goals. Using a judicious mix of qualitative and quantitative methods from multiple disciplines, applied in an innovative design for knowledge co-production with relevant stakeholders, the project will generate context-specific but generalizable knowledge on characteristics and enablers of climate-smart agriculture from existing bright spots. The innovative study design using top-down characterization and bottom-up scaling of drivers bridges gaps between conflicting discourses on climate-smart agriculture to identify existing levers for sustainable transformation of farming systems.
Netherlands