5 September 2012: Noting the challenges of ensuring food security, adapting agriculture to climate change, and minimizing agriculture’s contribution to climate change, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) has released a paper exploring the relationship between increased resource use efficiency for agricultural productivity in the context of meeting sustainable development and climate change objectives.

The paper, titled “Greening the Economy with Climate-Smart Agriculture,” explores possibilities for more efficient and resilient systems, and opportunities for climate-smart agriculture to be a driver of economic development. It stresses that central to economic development will be the development of service and input providers, transformation and access to markets, and investments in a greening economy. It presents concrete approaches to greening the economy through climate-smart agriculture, including the concerted and coordinated involvement of all stakeholders through a long-term process.

The paper stresses the concept that alongside the increased scarcity of resources, the goals of physical resource efficiency and economic efficiencies will become increasingly aligned, and that agriculture will continue to be fundamental instrument for sustainable development and poverty reduction. The paper was produced as a background paper for the Second Global Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change. [Publication: Greening the Economy with Climate-Smart Agriculture]