A deep-understanding framework and assessment indicator system for climate-resilient agriculture

Abstract

Climate change threatens agricultural production and leads to an increasing contradiction between food supply and needs. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural activities will exacerbate climate change in the future. Solving food security has become a major challenge around the world. The development of climate-resilient agriculture (CRA) is critical to address or slow climate change and is also helpful to improve agricultural quality and efficiency. Based on a review of previous studies and a deep understanding of CRA goals, this paper introduced a comprehensive assessment framework to evaluate CRA. This assessment framework combined four dimensions, i.e., agricultural productivity, farmer income, climate adaptability, and the green development level, and has 71 evaluation indicators. The highlights of this framework are to analyze the impacts of climate change on agricultural development and to stress the synergy of mitigation and adaptation strategies. All indicators represent various factors related to the development of CRA and have been used in previous studies. Therefore, the comprehensive assessment framework can be used as an evaluation tool for analyzing the changes in agroecosystem resilience under climate change, which is also helpful to implement scientific management to ensure sustainable agricultural development and food security.