Feeding the Future: Agroecological Pathways to Climate Adaptation and Food Security

Dairy Production and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A Critical Review of Advances in Measurement, Modelling and Mitigation

2026-09-11T12:22:49+00:00

Dairy production is a biologically and operationally complex source of greenhouse gases because enteric methane, manure-derived methane and nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide associated with energy and inputs arise through different processes and respond differently to management. This critical narrative review evaluates recent advances in measuring, modelling and mitigating these emissions, with emphasis on the methodological choices that determine whether reported reductions represent robust, transferable climate benefits. The literature was selected from accessible scholarly databases and authoritative institutional sources, with a principal eligibility period from 1 January 2006 to 14 June 2026 and earlier foundational evidence considered when essential. Measurement has progressed from reliance on controlled reference systems towards repeated animal-level monitoring, spectral proxies and facility-scale flux methods. These approaches expand throughput but introduce sampling, calibration and transferability problems that can be substantial when diets, housing or methane inhibitors alter the relationship between a proxy and true emission. Modelling has similarly diversified from inventory emission factors and empirical equations to mechanistic rumen models, whole-farm life-cycle models and data-driven prediction. Increasing complexity does not remove uncertainty; model credibility remains constrained by input quality, external validation, system boundaries and climate metrics. Mitigation evidence is strongest for 3-nitrooxypropanol under housed feeding, while nitrate, dietary lipid strategies, red seaweeds, genetic selection, herd management and manure interventions provide additional but more context-dependent opportunities. Recent grazing trials, long-duration inhibitor studies and farm-economic analyses show that persistence, delivery, animal response and incentive structure are central to real-world efficacy. The review concludes that credible decarbonisation of dairy production depends less on a single technology than on integration of validated measurement, intervention-aware modelling and whole-system accounting that captures cross-gas trade-offs, leakage and production effects. Priority research should therefore connect animal-scale efficacy to multi-year farm-scale verification across diverse production systems.

Fertiliser Use Efficiency in Climate-Smart Agriculture: A Critical Appraisal of Trade-offs Between Yield, Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Soil Health

2026-09-11T12:29:18+00:00

Fertiliser use efficiency occupies a central but poorly interrogated position within climate-smart agriculture, where it is routinely presented as the instrument through which higher yields, lower greenhouse gas emissions and improved soil condition can be reconciled. This critical narrative review examines whether the published evidence supports that reconciliation. The state of knowledge is assessed across four domains: the conceptual behaviour of efficiency metrics, the emissions consequences of efficiency-oriented management, the performance of the principal technological and agronomic interventions, and the relationship between nutrient management and soil biological, chemical and physical function. Literature was identified through searches of open scholarly databases and citation indexes, supplemented by backward citation searching, and every retained source was verified against authoritative bibliographic records. The synthesis indicates that partial efficiency ratios can rise while environmental performance deteriorates, because the most commonly reported indicators are insensitive to soil nutrient depletion, to the substitution of imported for internally cycled nutrients, and to upstream manufacturing emissions. Direct nitrous oxide emissions respond to nitrogen surplus more predictably than to application rate alone, which weakens the case for rate reduction as a stand-alone strategy and strengthens the case for balance-based management. Enhanced-efficiency fertilisers, subsurface placement, decision-support-guided nutrient management and combined organic and mineral inputs all show measurable benefits, but effect sizes are strongly conditioned by soil texture, pH, moisture regime and baseline management, and several interventions transfer losses between pathways rather than eliminating them. Evidence connecting efficiency to soil health is the weakest of the three pillars, constrained by short experimental durations, inconsistent indicator selection and unresolved causal direction. Confidence in a universal triple-win narrative is therefore limited. Priorities include multi-season, multi-gas experiments with harmonised soil health measurement, surplus-based accounting at farm and landscape scales, and evaluation of interventions in the under-fertilised systems where they have been least tested.

Agricultural Productivity under Climate Change in India: A Critical Synthesis of Prospects, Challenges and System Trade-offs

2026-09-11T12:32:39+00:00

Climate change is altering the biophysical and institutional conditions under which Indian agriculture produces food, income and rural employment. The central challenge is not simply whether average crop yields decline as temperatures rise, but whether farming systems can sustain productivity, yield stability and resource efficiency while exposure to heat, monsoon variability, drought, flooding and atmospheric pollution intensifies. This critical narrative review synthesises India-specific evidence on climate–productivity relationships, adaptation performance and cross-sector trade-offs. Literature published from 1 January 2000 to 14 June 2026 was considered, with earlier foundational evidence eligible when necessary. The evidence indicates that extreme and terminal heat, delayed monsoon onset, rainfall deficits and damaging rainfall extremes already constrain major cereals, although effects differ sharply by crop, agroecology, irrigation access and baseline productivity. Irrigation, altered sowing dates, heat-tolerant germplasm, zero or conservation tillage, integrated climate-smart portfolios and crop diversification can reduce losses, but none is uniformly effective. Irrigation is a particularly strong short-run buffer while simultaneously creating long-run vulnerability where groundwater extraction exceeds recharge. Likewise, groundwater-conservation rules can shift environmental costs towards crop-residue burning and air pollution when policy design ignores the narrow rice–wheat turnaround window. Evidence for conservation agriculture is stronger where timely machinery services and residue management are available, whereas adoption barriers remain substantial for smallholders with limited finance, secure tenure, knowledge or institutional support. The review argues that climate-resilient productivity should be assessed as a multi-objective outcome encompassing mean yield, downside risk, water and energy use, emissions, profitability, labour requirements, nutritional implications and distributional effects. Future research therefore needs harmonised, long-term, farm-linked datasets and multi-objective evaluation designs capable of distinguishing adaptation from resource depletion and of identifying who gains, who bears costs and under which agroecological conditions.

Dairy Production in Tropical Climates: A Critical Review of Heat Stress, Sustainability and Climate Adaptation

2026-09-11T12:37:43+00:00

Tropical and subtropical regions account for a large and expanding share of global milk output, yet the scientific literature that underpins dairy management remains dominated by evidence generated in temperate systems. This review critically examines the intersection of thermal stress, environmental sustainability and climate adaptation in tropical dairy production, and asks whether the prevailing evidence base is adequate to guide practice in the settings where warming is likely to be felt most acutely. Literature was identified through structured searching of multidisciplinary and biomedical scholarly indexes, supplemented by citation tracking, and was appraised for design quality, contextual relevance and consistency rather than aggregated quantitatively. Four problems recur across the reviewed evidence. Exposure is characterised almost universally by the temperature-humidity index, an aggregate measure whose thresholds were derived largely from high-yielding temperate herds and which performs inconsistently when applied to crossbred and indigenous genotypes under humid tropical conditions. The productive, reproductive and health consequences of chronic moderate thermal load are quantified far less reliably than the acute responses characterised in controlled facilities. Adaptation options are usually evaluated in isolation, so the interactions among genetic improvement, feeding, cooling infrastructure and herd management remain largely unquantified. Environmental assessments of tropical milk report wide between-farm variation in emissions intensity that is attributed principally to animal productivity, yet these analyses seldom incorporate the effect of heat load on performance, which recent experimental work indicates may raise methane yield and intensity directly. The evidence supports a cautious conclusion that improved animal productivity lowers emissions per unit of milk in most tropical settings, although the magnitude and durability of that benefit under progressive warming remain uncertain. Priorities include locally calibrated thermal metrics, longitudinal on-farm study of chronic exposure, factorial evaluation of combined adaptation packages, and environmental assessment that explicitly represents climate feedbacks on animal performance.

Dairy Cow Welfare and Climate Change: A Critical Narrative Review of Trade-offs, Synergies and the Ethics of Sustainable Milk Production

2026-09-11T12:42:36+00:00

Dairy production sits at the intersection of two agendas that have developed largely in parallel: the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant systems, and the improvement of animal welfare. Both agendas invoke the language of sustainability, yet they rest on different units of analysis, different evidentiary traditions and different normative commitments, and their interaction has received far less critical attention than either topic alone. This review examines the state of knowledge on the relationship between dairy cow welfare and climate change, treating climate as both a driver of welfare harm through rising thermal load and a source of interventions whose welfare consequences are frequently assumed rather than measured. Evidence was drawn from peer-reviewed literature retrieved through open scholarly databases and indexes, supplemented by citation searching and authoritative institutional sources, and appraised for design adequacy, measurement validity, geographical representativeness and consistency. Four findings dominate. Thermal load impairs welfare through mechanisms that are well characterised physiologically but poorly standardised in terms of threshold definition, so that heat-stress prevalence estimates are not comparable across studies. Heat abatement improves measured welfare while displacing environmental burden into water, electricity and embodied emissions, a transfer rarely quantified within the same analytical boundary. Anti-methanogenic feed additives, low-methane breeding and productivity-led intensification are evaluated overwhelmingly against production and emissions endpoints, with welfare treated as an absence of detected harm rather than as a measured outcome. Health, longevity and reduced involuntary culling represent the most defensible convergence between the two agendas, although the magnitude of the emissions benefit is sensitive to system boundaries and herd structure assumptions. The evidence supports neither a general synergy claim nor a general trade-off claim. Progress requires joint measurement within shared analytical boundaries, welfare-explicit reporting in mitigation trials, and governance instruments that prevent welfare from becoming invisible within carbon accounting.

Decision Support Systems for Sustainable Aquaculture under Climate Uncertainty: A Critical Review of Models, Applications and Methodological Limitations

2026-09-11T12:50:25+00:00

Aquaculture now supplies a substantial share of global aquatic food, and its continued expansion is expected to occur in waters whose temperature, oxygen content, carbonate chemistry and hydrodynamics are being reshaped by anthropogenic climate change. Decision support systems have been promoted as the principal means of translating environmental knowledge into siting, stocking, harvesting, licensing and investment choices, yet the field remains fragmented across spatial planning, bioenergetic simulation, ecological forecasting, machine learning and economic risk analysis, and existing reviews have generally examined these strands in isolation. This review critically evaluates how decision support systems for aquaculture represent, propagate and communicate climate uncertainty, and assesses whether the resulting tools are adequate to the decisions they are intended to inform. Literature was identified through structured searching of open scholarly indexes and institutional sources, complemented by citation tracking, with critical appraisal directed at model structure, treatment of uncertainty, validation status, spatial and temporal scale, and evidence of operational use. Four findings emerge. First, the mapping between the scale at which climate information is produced and the scale at which aquaculture decisions are taken remains poorly resolved, and downscaling to the coastal margin introduces uncertainties that are rarely propagated into decision outputs. Second, the great majority of tools treat climate as a scenario-indexed boundary condition rather than as a source of deep uncertainty, which favours optimisation over robustness. Third, data-driven and digital-twin approaches have advanced rapidly in short-horizon prediction while inheriting a stationarity assumption that is inconsistent with their stated climate purpose. Fourth, formal evaluation of decision quality, as distinct from predictive skill, is almost absent, and evidence of sustained uptake is concentrated in a small number of well-resourced temperate systems. Research priorities are identified in uncertainty propagation, robustness-oriented appraisal, transferable evaluation protocols and the extension of decision support to smallholder production.

Agroforestry for Erosion Control and Watershed Resilience in a Changing Climate: A Critical Review of Mechanism, Scale and Evidential Strength

2026-09-11T12:53:08+00:00

Soil erosion by water remains one of the most consequential forms of land degradation, and projections of intensifying rainfall erosivity have renewed interest in tree-based farming systems as a means of protecting soils and stabilising catchment hydrology. Agroforestry is frequently presented as a dual-purpose intervention that reduces soil loss while improving the water-regulating capacity of watersheds, yet the evidence supporting this proposition is uneven in quality, strongly concentrated at the plot scale, and rarely tested under the extreme rainfall conditions that dominate long-term sediment budgets. This review critically evaluates the state of knowledge on agroforestry as an erosion-control and watershed-resilience intervention, drawing on peer-reviewed literature retrieved through open scholarly databases and indexes and appraised for methodological adequacy, consistency and relevance. The synthesis is organised around four analytical problems: the mechanistic basis of erosion control in tree-based systems; the dependence of measured effectiveness on system configuration; the transferability of plot-scale effect sizes to catchment sediment yield; and the trade-off between improved infiltration and increased evapotranspiration in water-limited settings. The available evidence indicates that agroforestry reliably reduces interrill erosion and surface runoff where a dense ground layer and continuous litter cover are maintained, with quantitative syntheses reporting approximately halved soil loss relative to annual monocultures in humid and sub-humid tropical settings. Confidence declines sharply for concentrated-flow erosion, catchment sediment yield, low-flow maintenance and performance under high-magnitude storms, where measurements are scarce, methodologically heterogeneous and frequently confounded by simultaneous changes in tillage, residue management and grazing pressure. The persistent identification of tree canopies as the operative mechanism is not well supported; ground-layer cover and soil structural modification appear more decisive. Priority research needs include paired-catchment and long-term monitoring of tree-based systems, event-resolved measurement across storm magnitudes, explicit representation of sediment connectivity in evaluations, and quantification of the conditions under which infiltration gains outweigh transpiration losses. Agroforestry warrants continued policy support as a soil-conservation practice, but claims regarding catchment-scale water security remain conditional and require context-specific verification.