Finding sustainable agriculture solutions to meet food security and climate change challenges!

Agriculture possesses huge untapped potential to reduce poverty, bolster food security, adapt to climate change, reduce pressure on natural resources, and in many places lower greenhouse gas emissions. To realise this potential, farmers, fishers, and pastoralists must urgently become ‘climate-smart’, especially in the developing world, which will be hit hardest by climate change impacts.

Africa is a hotbed of climate-smart innovation, providing the ideal setting for this year’s Agriculture and Rural Development Day. Across the continent, rural communities are experimenting with options for achieving climate-change adaptation and mitigation through more sustainable crop production, livestock rearing and management of soils, water, fish, forests, agroforestry species, and other biodiversity.

You can help ensure that such innovations gain momentum – in Africa and elsewhere – by making a journey to Durban. If you can be there in person, register for Agriculture and Rural Development Day 2011 on this website. If not, join the journey virtually through Facebook, Twitter, our blog.

Please comment – we want to hear what you have to say about climate-smart agriculture!