Climate-smart agricultural practices and their role in enhancing farm resilience and environmental sustainability

Climate change is intensifying droughts, floods, heat stress and rainfall variability, pressuring food systems. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) seeks to sustainably increase productivity and incomes, build adaptive capacity and resilience, and reduce or remove greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions where possible. This review synthesizes peer-reviewed evidence on five CSA practice categories (conservation agriculture, agroforestry, irrigation management, crop diversification and integrated nutrient management) across four outcome domains: yield stability, soil organic carbon (SOC), water-use efficiency (WUE) and GHG outcomes. Precision and deficit irrigation were appraised separately. Following PRISMA 2020, Web of Science, Scopus and CAB Abstracts were searched for English-language records from January 2000 to May 2026; of 765 unique records screened, 85 studies were included. Because metrics, crops and contexts were heterogeneous, no pooled meta-analysis was undertaken; evidence was graded for direction and strength using a pre-defined protocol. No practice was supported across all four domains. The best-supported findings (graded strong) were SOC benefits from agroforestry, yield buffering from crop diversification and N2O reductions from improved nutrient management; deficit irrigation raised water productivity (graded moderate), with yield penalties rising with deficit severity. Conservation agriculture showed no consistent effect on temporal yield stability but improved yields under drought and heat in specific contexts. Direct comparison across practices was limited, and evidence on bundles is largely indirect, so the synergy framework is conceptual. Credit, tenure, extension and climate information were repeatedly associated with adoption. Priorities include harmonized multi-site trials and weighted meta-analysis.