Climate-Smart Agriculture — General Information

Climate-Smart agriculture is an approach aimed at transforming and changing the focus of agricultural systems targeting to ensure food security from the perspective of climate change. In recent decades, Brazilian agriculture has strongly expanded its agricultural frontier, which consequently increased the emission of greenhouse gases (68% of Brazilian emissions result from deforestation and agricultural activity). The current climate change scenario and increased international demand for food have a strong impact on these events, which in addition to making Brazilian agriculture more vulnerable to climate, also contribute to climate change. Thus, UFV has been conducting research for several years to obtain more adapted varieties and understand plant responses to stress factors, such as high irradiance, extreme temperature, water availability and increased CO2 concentration, as well as the mechanisms involved in the acclimatization to these factors. Yearther strong contribution to this theme is the investigation involving production animals increasingly exposed to heat stress conditions. In addition, increasing ambient temperature and high density and flow of animals favor the proliferation and spread of pathogens in production systems, which increases contamination pressure. The economic aspect is also important for the proposition of this theme. Anthropogenic climatic changes are mainly caused by economic interests. Thus, efforts to adapt and mitigate climate change must consider the economic forces that provide incentives to individuals and companies and thus drive the collective behavior of society.

GOALS

• Developing Climate-Smart Agriculture joint research projects with international groups.
• Consolidating international partnerships in Climate-Smart Agriculture through the granting of scholarships for sending faculty as visiting professors to an international institution and
  Universidade Federal de Viçosa hosting international visiting professors at UFV.
• Training human resources with international experience in Climate-Smart Agriculture.
• Promoting short term courses and / or regular classes for graduate programs to be conducted at the UFV by international professors in partnership with our faculty.

Graduate Programs

• Forestry Science
• Plant Science
• Applied Meteorology