Climate Change and Sustainable Agriculture: Water, Soil, Carbon, Crops and Livelihoods in Transition

Sustainable agricultural practices can improve environmental performance while maintaining productive livelihoods, yet their uptake remains uneven and their economic advantages are frequently overstated. This critical narrative review examines how profitability, risk, behavioural processes and extension support interact in decisions to trial, expand, maintain or abandon practices in crop-based farming systems. Literature published between 2000 and 22 July 2026 was selected through live scholarly searches, citation tracing and verification against publisher and institutional records. Evidence from agronomic syntheses, farm-economic studies, behavioural research and randomised extension and incentive experiments was appraised according to its measurement quality, causal identification and contextual relevance. The synthesis distinguishes agronomic potential from realised household returns and private profitability from social value. Diversification can generate economic and ecological benefits, but results depend on the whole production sequence, labour opportunity costs, transition duration, product markets and the distribution of benefits within households. Organic price premiums, conservation payments and carbon revenues must be separated from improvements in underlying production efficiency. Downside exposure, liquidity shortages, uncertain land access and learning costs can make non-adoption economically defensible even when average returns appear favourable. Behavioural explanations add value when they identify mechanisms rather than relabel resource constraints as resistance to change. Extension experiments show that information can improve knowledge and practice use, but effects on profits are less consistent, and digitally delivered advice does not independently establish environmental sustainability. A diagnostic approach is proposed in which advisory services, finance, risk protection and environmental payments are matched to the binding constraint and evaluated against persistence, household welfare and verified environmental outcomes. Immediate research priorities are multi-season transition accounts, credible evaluation of practice bundles, gender-disaggregated measures and post-support follow-up. Sustainable adoption is best understood as a continuing process of economically viable and environmentally accountable adaptation, not the maximisation of a single uptake rate.