Agriculture has always been weather-dependent, and today’s ever-accelerating climate change poses many challenges to farmers worldwide. Besides rising annual temperatures, changing soil structure, water availability, and other factors affect crop health and yield. Sustainable, aka climate-smart agriculture, can address most of these challenges, and Earth observation data plays a major part in this process. In the context of climate-smart agriculture, what is the Earth observation data? Below, we will explain this and more — starting with the importance of climate-smart agriculture and its main objectives.
Climate-smart agriculture: What is it good for
As the name suggests, climate-smart agriculture aims to promote smart, sustainable practices to optimize soil conditions, minimize budget spend, and maximize yield. In different areas, this may involve different methods. In Israel, for example, where water is scarce, drip irrigation is an absolute necessity. However, this same practice of delivering small amounts of water directly to the crops’ roots can be applied in many other areas as a climate-smart way to optimize natural resources.
Another great example of climate-smart agriculture is field conservation to avoid soil depletion. There are many ways to achieve this, from diversifying planted crops to eliminating tilling. To a certain extent, field conservation is a climate-smart agriculture method that has been practiced for centuries — for example, when farmers sow different crops in the same field but over specific intervals of time, thus ensuring timely soil restoration. As a result, the land is always ‘ready’ for planting, but the plants must change to ensure uninterrupted use.
Essentially, that’s what climate-smart agriculture is about — using thought-through, region-specific methods that optimize the use of available resources while maximizing yield and, consequently, profits. But with today’s changing climate and a growing social concern about business sustainability, climate-smart agriculture has a few additional objectives.
Objectives of climate-smart agriculture
While the original purpose of climate-smart agriculture is an optimal use of available resources to maximize yield, 21st-century reality emphasizes a couple of other vital points. First is the ever-accelerating climate change that makes it very difficult to foresee the best methods for nurturing crops. In some regions, droughts are growing more common, while in others, atmospheric precipitation levels increase. Both pose challenges for traditional, region-specific crops and call for new climate-smart agriculture practices.
First, it’s important to plant weather and climate-resilient crops that can withstand changing, often downright aggressive, climate fluctuations. Depending on the specific area, this can mean either planting entirely new crops, not traditionally associated with this region or using genetic modification to protect historically traditional crops from new kinds of vermin or changing climate conditions.
Another 21st-century objective in climate-smart agriculture is keeping an eye on carbon emissions — if not entirely eliminating them (which is hardly ever an option), then at least reducing them as much as possible. Commercial farming, especially livestock production and rice cultivation, contributes a lot of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. It’s important to reduce those to slow down climate change and alleviate its consequences on commercial agriculture, making it more climate-smart.
Today, several climate-smart agriculture technologies help achieve these objectives:
- Precision agriculture, which implies close monitoring of land to analyze the effects of new fertilizers, pesticides, and watering techniques to pick only the most effective, climate-smart solutions;
- Agroforestry, or the introduction of trees into agricultural landscapes as a climate-smart way to reduce erosion and prevent soil depletion;
- Using renewable energy, like solar and wind panels to minimize dependence on fossil fuels and carbon emissions, etc.
What are the benefits of Earth observation?
In the context of climate-smart agriculture, Earth observation technology ensures global coverage and detailed analysis of land changes over extended periods of time. Analyzing previous data helps isolate specific trends in climate and land changes, detect anomalies, and develop future forecasts. Today, Earth observation data already provides information on:
- Crop and land conditions, helping with future yield forecasts;
- Historic climate change analysis for adjusting climate-smart farming practices;
- Land usage and its effects, which helps prevent soil depletion;
- Pests and diseases, allowing for quick action to prevent loss of crops or livestock, etc.
Impressive as it already is, that’s not the limit. The actual potential of earth observation data for climate-smart agriculture is far greater, especially considering today’s advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence — both incredibly useful tools for analyzing huge volumes of data transmitted by satellites.
These advances can greatly alleviate data processing and analysis, which, potentially, could have a positive impact on data sharing — especially with communities in developing countries that do not have access to satellite technology or enough information climate-smart practices. So far, this lack of access remains the biggest challenge in adopting climate-smart agriculture on a global level — something that would greatly benefit the environment, potentially even slowing down climate change.