Managing climate change impacts on food production and security in Sri Lanka: the importance of climate-smart agriculture

Abstract

Sri Lanka is increasingly concerned about the impacts of climate change on food production, food security, and livelihoods. This has been mostly discussed in terms of climate impacts on crop productivity (food availability), with little emphasis on other key aspects, namely food access and use. This chapter, based on existing literature, adopted a food system model to obtain a better perspective on food security issues in Sri Lanka. These issues include diminishing agricultural productivity, food loss and wastage along supply chains, low rural poor subsistence resilience, and the prevalence of high under-nutrition and infant malnutrition. This review indicates that ensuring food security requires actions beyond climate-resilient food production systems to take an integrated approach that can promote the climate stability of the entire food system, while addressing nutritional issues emerging f rom climate change impacts. There is, therefore, an urgent need for settlers to work towards a climate-smart agricultural framework that will tackle all aspects of food security. Besides the output of a few crop species, our study displays a lack of research into the consequences of climate change on Sri Lanka’s food system. More such studies are required to examine how climate change can affect other components of food system, including the productivity of a diverse range of food crops, livestock, and fisheries, and to focus attention on the avenues of an environmentally-induced nutritional insecurity.