European Journal of Sustainable Agroecosystems

Background: Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is a leading approach to reconcile some of the most pressing concerns of today, namely enhancing agricultural production, improving resilience to unpredictable climate changes, and curbing the GHG emissions from food systems. While CSA combines different scales of approaches — from agricultural fields, farms, and landscapes to public policies and institutions — most of the studies on CSA are focused on one of the scales (mainly on farm or field) and don't assess the impact of CSA measures across the scales.

Objective: The objective of this paper is to analyze existing research on multi-scale assessment of CSA intervention and compare different assessment frameworks of CSA across all the relevant scales.

Sources of literature: A reviewer has conducted a systematic review including a search in Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, Google Scholar, AGRIS, and grey literature from the FAO, World Bank, IPCC, and CGIAR from 2012 to 2026.

Notable results: From the evidence investigated, it is visible that the use of CSA practices like conservation tillage, integrated soil-fertility management, agroforestry, water-efficient irrigation, and climate-smart advisory services leads to positive results in terms of productivity, adaptability, and mutual benefits, but the level of adoption is rather low and varies in different places due to various factors such as land tenure, access to credit, gender priorities, extension contact, and market access. Different methods and approaches for assessing institutions and landscapes have been created to analyze the trade-offs between productivity, egalitarianism, and ecosystem services. Nowadays, digital technologies (remote sensing, unmanned aerial vehicles, IoT, and AI) are widely employed in monitoring but differ in availability.

Research Gaps: Existing gaps include the insufficiency of longitudinal and multi-scale impact studies, ambiguity in definitions of terms, lack of cooperation between biophysical and socio-economic indicators, minimal focus on gender-sensitive and intersectional effects, and insufficient methods to harmonise benefits at farm level with trade-offs at landscape level.

Conclusion: To advance CSA science, it is necessary to implement harmonised monitoring, reporting, and verification systems that combine data on biophysical field conditions with indicators about household welfare and approach to governance in the landscape, which can be achieved through application of standardised indicators, extended monitoring periods, and equal distribution of climate financing for small farms.