Edinburgh Napier University

  Agriculture and food production systems are responsible for up to 29% of greenhouse gas emissions. A significant contributor to this phenomenon is the dominance of industrial large-scale monoculture cropping on approximately 80% of the 1.5 billion hectares devoted to agriculture. Additionally, over 570 million smallholder farmers comprise 84% of polyculture farms that produce approximately 30% of food worldwide. These farms consist of over two billion people cultivating less than 2 hectares without adequate land tenure, mostly in marginal or risk-prone environments. Despite possessing a wealth of traditional knowledge, which works with nature and natural elements, smallholder farmers suffer from the marginalization of input resources, capital, assets, and technical information. These limiting conditions impede their adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change in coping with the challenges of sustainable production. Smallholder farmers and their dependents comprise approximately 75% of the world's underprivileged, hungry, and undernourished people capable of influencing human-induced climate change.

This paper examines smallholder farming as a catalyst for nature-based solutions utilizing agroecology which relies on the ecosystem's natural features as mitigation and adaptation measures. It integrates adaptive measures of the Trinidad farm that received the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA's) 2021 Hemispheric "Soul of Rurality" Award of the Americas. The research aims to advocate building resilient agriculture in the Caribbean to cope with the impacts of climate change in achieving food and nutrition security.