Leveraging digital tools for climate-smart farming to enhance sustainable food production systems

Achieving Sustainable Food Production Systems (SFPS) remain the fundamental challenge of the agricultural sector across the world. This comes at a time where human population grows at approximately 0.84% worldwide, which then increases human needs for food and fibre. While dealing with this challenge, climate change presents another dimension of agricultural challenge, of both growth and development and also as a threat to the sector. This review paper, therefore, systematically, explored the adoption of digital tools for use in Climate-Smart Agriculture for SFPSs. The findings show that the use of digital tools in the agricultural sector enhances farmers’ resilience to the harsh climatic conditions, improves productivity (both yields and income/profits), it breaks the limitations faced by farmers in market access and participation, improves credit access and/or access to grants and finance as well as attracts the young and talented people into the sector. The findings further show that developing countries will experience increased national GDPs, increased employment opportunities which come with the creation of conducive environments for small businesses to thrive, including smallholder farmers. Furthermore, the development and implementation of data-driven policies for sustainable development and agriculture will ensure efficient resources allocation and management among agricultural development stakeholders. This paper therefore concludes that the integration of digital agriculture tools in the FPSs exposes governments and food producers to institutional and infrastructure challenges in the use of digital tools to achieving SFPSs. Hence, it is recommended that future studies examine the role of government policy in the adoption of Digital Agriculture (DA), and the level at which DA attracts the youths into the agricultural sector needs to be explored.