**3. Rationale for capacity development in CSA**

*Climate Change and Agriculture*

advisors.

ecosystems" [7].

 If it can be mitigated and adaptation be encouraged, they can make a difference. This chapter focuses on climate-smart technologies with these specific objectives:

• To indicate the impact of climate change to crops and livestock as well as the

• To identify climate-smart technologies and strategies to scale up by extension

Evidence suggests that climate change has become a big matter in the world

Rising air temperatures trigger several important secondary effects. Increased global day- and nighttime temperatures are causing changes to seasonality. Warmer air temperatures are melting the polar ice caps, northern latitude ice shields, and high-altitude glaciers worldwide, leading to changes in the timing and volume of

In order to slow down this process, human beings should be helped to understand some of the steps that need to be taken. One would interrogate as to what is the link between climate change and CSA. It can be argued that while climate change increases, the vulnerability to agriculture which results in variability of temperature and reduced rainfall or in some instances brings out flood. On the other hand, Juvadi [9] identified three critical contributions that come as a result of CSA, namely: (a) CSA reduces agriculture contribution to climate change; (b) strengthens resilience to climate change and variability; and (c) sustainably

International organizations, such as International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), saw the importance of CSA to an extent that it has established projects in Africa reaching out to countries such as Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa, and Sudan with one aim to capacitate the extension functionaries in order to best serve farmers with climate-smart agriculture. The project will develop CSA technologies and CSA farms in vulnerable regions of Ethiopia and Sudan. These technologies include improved crop varieties and land management, improved soil fertility management, integrated pest and weed management, agroforestry, and improved livestock systems. These CSA farms will also serve as research and training

with organizations pulling their efforts in an attempt to find solution, for example, according to [6]. Climate change will exert increasing pressure on our ability to meet other major challenges, with feeding the world's growing population paramount 9.6 billion by 2050; see [7]. Over the next 40 years, the need to increase global cereal production by a minimum of 60–70% [8], the question to be asked is what is our understanding of climate change, what are the causes, and can these be mitigated? Researchers and scientists have been grappling with these questions, and some have given their understanding. Climate change plays a negative role to agriculture and causes excessive gases in the atmosphere, and the existence of "high levels of CO2 would have a catastrophic effect on the planet's

• To define climate smart and how it is linked to climate change.

• To indicate steps that extension advisors can adopt in scaling it.

• To discuss the impact of climate change in agriculture.

mitigation strategies that can be used.

**2. Background and motivation**

freshwater discharge and rising sea levels [7].

increases productivity and income [9].

**224**

It is the opinion of the author that the need for climate change knowledge on both adaptation and mitigation is a must in order to assist in the solving the challenges posed by the negative effects of climate change in farmers especially the smallholder one because in most cases, they are not well positioned in terms of knowledge as well as financial muscle to handle the threat posed by climate change.

For example, areas that receive flood change the ecosystems leading to new host of pathogenic organisms, or in some cases the environment is altered, and new diseases emerge which threatens the survival of these smallholder farmers. Authors have developed manuals to assist agricultural advisors to cope with such situations, see [6, 9–12].
