Climate-smart agricultural practices- determinants and impact on crop production. New insights from Afghanistan

Intensive agricultural practices increase crop yields but worsen the carbon footprint, which contributes to global warming. The adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices (CSAPs) offers a potential solution for enhancing crop productivity, mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and improving climate resilience for environmental sustainability. This study examines the impact of CSAPs adoption intensity on production risk, estimated by mean yield, yield variability (variance), and yield skewness (downside risk). We used a conditional mixed-process (CMP) model and ex-post non-experimental data from small rice farmers in Afghanistan. Our findings reveal that intensifying the adoption of CSAPs leads to a significantly enhanced mean yield by 54 kg/acre, substantially decreased yield variability by 36 kg/acre, and downside risk by 22 kg/acre. Farmers’ decisions to increase the adoption of CSAPs were influenced by their education, household family laborers, climate information access, credit access, perceived drought stress, sharecropping land, land fragmentation, farmers’ location, and agricultural training. Our findings suggest that promoting policies that motivate farmers to increase the adoption of CSAPs can effectively mitigate production risks and yield failure, specifically in the context of small-scale farming.