Evaluating the practices of climate-smart agriculture sustainability in Ethiopia using geocybernetic assessment matrix

The geocybernetic assessment matrix (GAM) evaluation of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices in Ethiopia is carried out in this paper. With regard to the five fundamental geocybernetic paradigms, the GAM is built to determine the nature and level of sustainability or unsustainability that exists. The goal of the GAM assessment is to determine the nature and level of sustainability of the three core criteria of the CSA: (1) productivity, (2) resilience and (3) mitigation. In particular, it is to determine, from a geocybernetic point of view, the nature of the CSA practices of farmers in the climate change era to manage their agricultural production systems. The overall patterns from the viewpoint of the standardization paradigm indicate strong sustainability. Although the findings obtained in relation to other paradigms suggest that in most CSA practices, limitations remain in achieving managed co-evolution. This indicates that there is still an obvious disagreement from a geocybernetic perspective as to the essence of sustainable development desired. In addition, the findings reveal substantial anthropocentric skews within the goals, whereby they appear to concentrate solely on social and economic interests, as opposed to a holistic point of view that encompasses the environment. There is a need to set priorities, goals and benchmarks to resolve the overlooked CSA practices in order to facilitate sustainable development along an optimal direction and to preserve interests in social, economic and environmental co-evolution at all spatio-temporal scales. Furthermore, we argue that research agendas need to concentrate on inventing locally adapted site-specific innovations for local farmers.