Smallholders’ climate change adaptation strategies: exploring effectiveness and opportunities to be capitalized

This systematic review aims to consolidate climate change adaptation strategies and identify opportunities triggered considering climate change risks by smallholders in different parts of the world to capitalize on and take advantage of improving livelihoods and increasing the level of resilience. We employed PRISMA flow chart to filter out articles from the literature which are published in English from 2010 to 2021 and extracted data from 92 articles. Results from these articles revealed a multitude of context-specific adaptation strategies, mainly categorized as crop management, livestock management, land/soil management, conservation agriculture, and climate smart agriculture practices. Consequently, all the articles revealed that proper application of practices and technologies was positive in improving productivity and production, which consequently led to enhanced smallholders’ livelihoods in general. However, the effectiveness of adaptation strategies increases with the simultaneous application of complementary adaptation practices. Although multiple financial schemes, such as climate indexed insurance, climate credit, and carbon trading, which are aimed at strengthening smallholders’ capacity to adapt to climate change and support environmental sustainability, are launched by the global community, they are still in their infancy in most sub-Saharan and Southern Asian countries. Therefore, the development, consolidation, and wider dissemination of context-specific, low-cost, and effective climate-smart practical innovations with complementarities and enabling policy and institutional support for smallholders are essential to reduce climate change impacts.