**9.4 Sustainable land management SLM**

Both public as well as private benefits can be obtained through SLM innovations, making them a potential tool of finding the 'win-win' solutions for poverty, environmental issues and food scarcity. Farmers as a private beneficiary of SLM will get an increased productivity, lower costs, better production stability through growing as well as conserving natural capital (like water resources, soil organic matter, and different types of biodiversity). Through SLM practices soil fertility improved by using large quantity of biomass, reducing the soil disruption, conservation of water and soil, an increased activity as well as diversity of soil fauna, and supporting the

elemental cycling mechanism. All this led to improved plant nutritional quality, high water retention ability, and improvement in soil structure contributing to increased yields as well as high resilience, ultimately resulting in improved food as well as livelihood [46].

#### **9.5 Improved water management system**

Loss of water can be countered and an improved water management can be achieved by the means of water and soil conservation; either by reduce irrigation which helped to maximize the yield per volume of water used; or through using more efficient irrigation technologies that can minimize the unproductive water loss through evaporation. Buy to attain a high irrigation efficiency and addition energy costs also required, because expansion of irrigation should have to be accompanied by the precise energy technologies (e.g. solar pumps). Strategy development and decision making for the water management and control should be accompanied with the water balance analysis, as for understanding of the impact of changes in water usage in agriculture on the water cycle, a precise assessment of water balance is required for both filed as well as catchment levels. But in upstream areas, introduction of rainwater harvesting technique on a large scale could adversely affects the downstream water users by affecting the groundwater recharge and flux.

#### **9.6 Agro-ecosystem based cropping system approach**

Changing climate, sustainable crop production and mitigation in agriculture are linked with each other. The management of ago-ecosystems for production of food, fodder and fuel as well as for management for adaption and mitigation to the changing climate have same fundamental principles and can also work together to attain the same goal: by ensuring the availability of enough, nutritious food for present as well as for future. A resilient ecosystem required for adaption and mitigation to changing climate as well as for crop production, this can be attain using practices and approaches basically based on the ecosystem services and sustainable management of biodiversity (**Figure 6**).

*Climate Smart Crops for Food Security DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99164*

#### **Figure 6.**

*Agro-ecosystem-based cropping system approach.*

Climate smart crop production system is same as the sustainable crop production system as both concerned with climate change. Different opportunities for adaption to climate change and mitigation through contribution to the maintenance and delivery of different public goods like clean water, flood protection, carbon sequestration, ground water recharge and landscape amenity has been provided by sustainable agriculture system. Sustainable agriculture system has been less vulnerable to the stresses and shocks. Productive and sustainable agriculture systems make of the best crop varieties, livestock breeds as well as their biodiversity, agroecological and agronomic management [47].

The drastic impact of climatic changes on crop productivity has already been felt by agriculture sector. For example, in India, production of rice has been decreased 23% during the period of 2001-2002 due to water scarcity [48]. In Indonesia, about 1 344 million tonnes production of rice has been lost due to flooding [49]. While in Mississippi state of the USA, an estimated loss of up to US\$ 8 billion were recorded due to flooding before the harvest season in 2008 [50].

For the security of future food production, crop production system needs to be adopted and mitigated the climate changes. To contrast the impacts of climate change, a better understanding of biological processes (below and above ground) which are involved in farm management practices, is needed. For this purpose, ecosystem management should integrate the different measures for building the resilience and mitigating risk in agriculture. All these elements have become critical under the changing climatic conditions. Biodiversity is essential to maintain the key functions of ecosystem (its structure and process) and to provide vital ecosystem services. It's a significant regulator of agro-ecosystem functions, not only due to its impact on production, but also for filling a variety of needs of the farmers as well as society at large. Biodiversity not only can increase the resilience of agro-ecosystems, but also act as means of risk reducing and adapting to the climate change. Agro-ecosystem managers, including the farmer, can enhance, build upon and manage the essential ecosystem services which have been provided by the biodiversity their efforts for a sustainable agricultural production system.
