Agricultural activities account for around one-fifth of the greenhouse impact produced by human action, according to the IPCC.
FREMONT, CA: Climate change affects agriculture both as a cause and as a result of it. Water depletion and soil health have been significantly impacted by industrial agriculture. According to the IPCC, the premier international agency for climate change assessment, agricultural activities account for around one-fifth of the greenhouse impact produced by human action. Today, the amount of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere is almost 412 parts per million (ppm), and it is rising. This is a 47 percent increase since the dawn of the industrial period when the concentration was around 280 parts per million and an 11 percent increase since 2000 when it was 370 parts per million. Agriculture and related activities such as rice cultivation, domestic animal raising, and biomass burning contribute 22–46 percent of global methane concentration.
Paddy fields are the most significant source of methane emissions, accounting for 15–20 percent of global methane emissions generated by human activity. Agriculture, on the other hand, is marked by fragmented land holding, low capital investment, ownership by small and marginal farmers, moderate-to-nil mechanization, and low productivity in many geographies, particularly in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. The world's poorest communities are largely clustered in the same locations. According to a World Bank report on Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) published in 2020, the world will require almost 70 percent more food by 2050 to feed an anticipated 9 billion people.
The FAO of the United Nations created the concept of CSA twelve years ago to manage the farming, livestock, forests, and fisheries holistically. Bhutan has concentrated on high-value crops by constructing large-scale poly houses with mobile-controlled smart irrigation. Windstorms and hailstorms are protected by such measures. Farmers in the Philippines are using their smartphones to get real-time scientific information from Rice Crop Managers in order to make informed decisions about how to reduce vulnerabilities. Zimbabwe, which suffered from prolonged droughts from 1950 to 2013, has now adopted drought-resistant grains such as millets, sorghum, and cassava as part of the CSA project. Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer and exporter, faced droughts in 2020. In India, a trial programme to boost bio-efficiency by spraying insecticides and pesticides with drones has begun.
