Climate smart agriculture and global food-crop production

RESEARCH ARTICLE Climate smart agriculture and global food- crop production Alessandro De PintoID1*, Nicola Cenacchi1, Ho-Young KwonID2, Jawoo Koo1, Shahnila Dunston1 1 Environment and Production Technology Division, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, United States of America, 2 Energy Systems Division, Argonne National Laboratories, Lemont, IL, United States of America * a.depinto@cgiar.org Abstract Most business-as-usual scenarios for farming under changing climate regimes project that the agriculture sector will be significantly impacted from increased temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns. Perhaps ironically, agricultural production contributes substantially to the problem with yearly greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of about 11% of total anthropo- genic GHG emissions, not including land use change. It is partly because of this tension that Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) has attracted interest given its promise to increase agricul- tural productivity under a changing climate while reducing emissions. Considerable resources have been mobilized to promote CSA globally even though the potential effects of its wide- spread adoption have not yet been studied. Here we show that a subset of agronomic prac- tices that are often included under the rubric of CSA can contribute to increasing agricultural production under unfavorable climate regimes while contributing to the reduction of GHG. However, for CSA to make a significant impact important investments and coordination are

required and its principles must be implemented widely across the entire sector. 1 Introduction Uncertainty in projections makes it difficult to determine the precise impact of climate change on future agricultural productivity, but studies have consistently found that under most scenarios sig- nificant negative effects should be expected worldwide [1–6] and especially in economically underdeveloped regions [7–9]. Importantly, agricultural production is not only affected by climate change but contributes substantially to the problem with yearly greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that range from 5.0 to 5.8 Gt CO2 e or about 11% of total anthropogenic GHG emissions [10]. Combined with forestry and other land uses, anthropogenic land activities contribute about a quarter of annual GHG emissions, which is the equivalent of 10 to 12 Gt CO2 e per year [10]. Recent developments in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change nego- tiations (i.e. the Paris Agreement in 2015 and the Koronivia joint work on agriculture [11,12]) and the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report [13] have reinvigorated calls for incentives to reduce GHG emissions, including the pricing of carbon and the levy of a carbon tax. However, the latest analyses on the subject [14,15] indicate that a tax on GHG emis- sions may lead to significant tradeoffs between emissions abatement and food security. PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231764 April 29, 2020 1 / 19 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS

Citation: De Pinto A, Cenacchi N, Kwon H-Y, Koo J, Dunston S (2020) Climate smart agriculture and global food-crop production. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0231764. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0231764 Editor: Paolo Agnolucci, University College London, UNITED KINGDOM Received: September 11, 2019 Accepted: March 31, 2020 Published: April 29, 2020 Copyright: © 2020 De Pinto et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The data used for this analysis are available for download at https:// github.com/IFPRI/Climate-Smart-Ag-PlosOne. Funding: The authors acknowledge the generous support of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) funded by CGIAR Fund Donors and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security, which is carried out with support from CGIAR Fund Donors and through bilateral funding agreements.