Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an approach that helps guide actions to transform agri-food systems towards green and climate-resilient practices. CSA has three primary dimensions:
(1) sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes,
(2) adapting and building resilience to climate change, and
(3) contributing to climate-change mitigation by removal of greenhouse gas emissions, where possible.
In Cambodia, the current agricultural systems focus on conventional production practices that tend to have intrinsically higher vulnerability to climate change, whilst the enabling environment for climate change adaptation in the agricultural sector remains weak, particularly in the case of rice production. By adopting a CSA-oriented approach, the project will promote increased integration of climate resilience within rice-based farming systems, and this will be achieved through the identification of proven climate-adaptive on-farm practices and technologies and raising awareness of these through demonstrations and farmer field schools (FFS) alongside small-scale community investments to enable broader adoption of these technologies, and strengthening of value chains for rice as well as diversified crops through market-based incentives.
The CSA-oriented approach in the PCRL project is to rice-based communities in the Tonle Sap region of Cambodia reduce their climate vulnerability and increase their resilience to climate change through an ecosystem-based, market-driven approach.
