Sustainable Agriculture Strategies for Climate Adaptation and Mitigation: A Comprehensive Guide

Food systems sit at the centre of the twenty-first century sustainability challenge because they are simultaneously indispensable to human wellbeing, deeply exposed to climatic disruption, and major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. This review examines the climate-food nexus through a farm-to-fork perspective, treating food systems not merely as agricultural production systems but as interconnected supply chains linking land, water, energy, labour, trade, processing, transport, retail, diets, and waste. The review synthesises evidence on two interdependent dynamics. This review used a structured narrative approach designed to capture interdisciplinary scholarship across agriculture, environmental science, nutrition, geography, and supply-chain studies. Searches were undertaken across Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and PubMed for the period January 2006 to March 2026. First, climate change is already disrupting food systems through yield instability, heat stress, changing pest and disease pressures, infrastructure damage, cold-chain vulnerabilities, labour constraints, trade interruptions, food safety risks, and deteriorating diet quality in vulnerable populations. Secondly, food systems themselves generate substantial emissions across both farm and post-farm stages, including land-use change, on-farm methane and nitrous oxide, processing, refrigeration, packaging, logistics, retail operations, household consumption, and food loss and waste. The evidence reviewed shows that the geography of climate risk and the geography of emissions do not fully coincide, which creates major governance challenges but also opens opportunities for more targeted transformation. The article argues that effective transformation must combine decarbonisation with resilience, rather than treating mitigation and adaptation as separate agendas. Priority pathways include diversified and climate-resilient production, lower-emission cold chains and logistics, waste prevention, demand-side dietary shifts, stronger traceability and metrics, and governance arrangements that integrate nutrition, equity, trade, and environmental goals. The review concludes that global food supply chains can no longer be evaluated primarily on efficiency and price; they must be redesigned around resilience, low emissions, nutritional adequacy, and distributive fairness.