The Future of Farming: Exploring Climate Smart Agriculture (FutureLearn)

Discover Climate Smart Agriculture and how it could be applied to farming

Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) offers one possible approach based on three principles:

1. Mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions

2. Adaption to climate change

3. Stable or increased food productivity

Throughout this course we will encourage you to explore these principles and take a critical look at how they could be translated into practice, using the examples of dairy farming and wine production in the EU.

We’ll examine the environmental impacts of dairy farming, the challenges farmers are facing as a result of climate change and review some climate smart approaches that might help them become more sustainable. We’ll then explore wine production looking at the influence of climate change on growing grapes in Europe, what research is being done and again how we can adapt wine production to climate change.

Understand the relationship between farming and climate change

To help demonstrate the relationship between farming and climate change (and learn how CSA could be applied) we’ll touch on global warming and greenhouse gases but also economic and political aspects related to the environment such as: food labelling, funding, policies and regulation.

Evaluate the future of Climate Smart Agriculture

We’ll discuss how to measure the impact of CSA. We’ll look at the barriers for the industry to adopting CSA and how to overcome them. We’ll also explore the critical views on the concept and compare the principles of CSA to other agricultural practices.