Sustainable Agricultural Intensification: Evolving Adaptation Fissures and Ecosystem Services Resilience

Vulnerable habitats and conditions are becoming fragmented and fragile while species behaviors and disrupting mutualisms of long standing are altering. These challenges represent an extraordinary threat to society and a call for urgent discursive shifts between the scientific community and policy makers. It has been indicated that in order to meet the stated climate change targets, global society will needs to get on board the mitigation train. To date, most of the national climate policy initiatives in developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, have focused on adaptation, notably through the National Adaptation Programme of Action. Recent however, climate discourses have indicated the significance of synergies between mitigation and adaptation actions with a shift towards developing climate resilient economies or green growth. Therefore, inSub-Saharan Africa, in order for mitigation train to obtain a moral high ground, we need to question how society is getting onboard the adaptation train. Whereas the emergence of adaptation and mitigation linkages brings to focus new prospects for management of farms, crops, livestock, aquaculture and capture fisheries, the prospects for Climate Smart Agriculture is still riddled with local knowledge and data gaps amidst new data capture and knowledge generation opportunities. In this article we discuss these gaps, highlight one promising climate smart innovation, the Bhungroo Irrigation Technology and the most efficient ways by which rural communities could be engaged. It was determined that multi-stakeholder dialoguing will better be able to facilitate underlying opportunities or challenges supplanting the broader fixation on techno-infrastructural studies with more socio-technical systems thinking.