Description
In the face of the current climate crisis, we appear to be neglecting, and even exacerbating, an equally pressing ecological concern: biodiversity loss. In doing so, we increasingly treat the climate crisis as the ecological crisis of our times despite concerns that we have entered a sixth mass extinction. This trend is particularly acute in the agriculture, with the rise of “Climate Smart Agriculture” (CSA) as the globally touted approach to mitigate the sector’s disproportionate contributions to climate change and to build resilience to its acute vulnerabilities within a warming planet. This paper highlights how CSA discursively excludes broader environmental concerns - specifically biodiversity - in the service of its “triple win” approach to address climate change while increasing productivity to feed a growing global population. In doing so, it reviews prominent CSA discursive framings and the practices associated with them, the corporate power that both drives them and benefits from them, and the associated biodiversity implications of these approaches. The paper argues that most of these practices not only fail to mitigate the biodiversity and habitat losses from industrial agriculture, they have the potential to exacerbate them. By contrast, these production approaches privilege large scale corporate interests, including fertilizer, herbicide, seed, and digital technology sectors specific to agriculture, as well as financial interests both within and beyond the agricultural sector. It concludes by demonstrating that an agricultural approach that prioritizes biodiversity restoration in agricultural systems not only benefits biodiversity and habitats, but can mitigate and build resilience to climate change as well.
