Conservation agriculture (CA) is widely recognized as the cornerstone of sustainable agriculture. It prioritizes minimizing soil disturbance, maintaining permanent soil cover, and diversifying crop species to restore soil health and ecosystem resilience. This review synthesizes the effects of CA on the soil’s physical–chemical and biological properties. It demonstrates its effectiveness in improving soil structure, enhancing organic carbon sequestration, promoting microbial activity, increasing water-use efficiency, and reducing erosion and nutrient losses. The paper then highlights the broad environmental, economic, and social benefits of CA. These include biodiversity conservation, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, improved yields, and increased food system resilience. The review explores the synergistic role of technological innovations such as precision agriculture, remote sensing, and digital tools in scaling CA for higher productivity and sustainability. The review then examines how socioeconomic conditions, institutional frameworks, and policy interventions shape CA adoption and impact. Despite its growing adoption, CA’s successful implementation will require strategies adapted for local needs, capacity-building, and supportive, inclusive policies. Finally, the review identifies key CA research gaps and future directions. This provides a comprehensive foundation to advance CA as a climate-smart, resilient, and sustainable pathway to ensure global food security and environmental stewardship.

Although intensive farming practices have greatly increased food production, they have undermined the soil ecosystem services on which agriculture depends. Biochar application in soils is increasingly gaining worldwide acceptance as a means of addressing these environmental challenges while enhancing agricultural productivity. Biochar offers dual benefits that support food security and ecological well-being through enhanced soil fertility and plant nutrition. These benefits include water retention, promotion of soil microbial functioning, carbon sequestration, and nutrient absorption, among others. In spite of these known benefits, many studies continue to emphasize the roles biochar plays in enhancing soil health and crop yields but often neglect the influence of biochar characteristics, which are key in optimizing these soil ecosystem services. Thus, it is important to understand how biochar characteristics influence soil in supporting, regulating, and provisioning ecosystem services. This review offers a comprehensive and integrative assessment on how biochar’s characteristics influence key soil ecosystem services rather than examining each service individually. The focus is on how biochar feedstock material and pyrolysis temperature determine the characteristics of generated biochar and how these characteristics influence biochar’s efficacy in supplying soil ecosystem services and nutrient dynamics for enhanced crop yields.

Air pollution is an escalating global challenge with profound implications for agricultural production and food security. This review explores the impacts of deteriorating air quality on global crop yields and food security, emphasizing both direct physiological effects on plants and broader environmental interactions. Key pollutants such as ground-level ozone (O₃), fine particulate matter (PM_2.5 and PM₁₀), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), sulfur dioxide (SO₂), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) reduce crop yield and quality. They have been shown to inhibit plant growth, potentially by affecting germination, morphology, photosynthesis, and enzyme activity. PAH contamination, for example, can negatively affect soil microbial communities essential for soil health, nutrient cycling and organic matter decomposition. They persist and accumulate in food products through the food chain, raising concerns about food safety. The review synthesizes evidence demonstrating how air pollution undermines the four pillars of food security: availability, access, utilization, and stability by reducing crop yields, elevating food prices, and compromising nutritional quality. The consequences are disproportionately severe in low- and middle-income countries, where regulatory and infrastructural limitations exacerbate vulnerability. This study examines mitigation strategies, including emission control technologies, green infrastructure, and precision agriculture, while stressing the importance of community-level interventions and real-time air quality monitoring through IoT and satellite systems. Integrated policy responses are urgently needed to bridge the gap between environmental regulation and agricultural sustainability. Notably, international cooperation and targeted investments in multidisciplinary research are essential to develop pollution-resilient crop systems and inform adaptive policy frameworks. This review identifies critical knowledge gaps regarding pollutant interactions under field conditions and calls for long-term, region-specific studies to assess cumulative impacts. Ultimately, addressing air pollution is not only vital for ecosystem health, but also for achieving global food security and sustainable development in a rapidly changing environment.

African elephants (Loxodonta africana) are megaherbivores of the African savannas requiring extensive ranges that can provide critical resources for their survival and reproduction at different spatiotemporal scales. We studied seasonal differences in home range sizes and daily distance to the nearest surface water sources by five male and 10 female African elephants in the eastern Okavango Panhandle in northern Botswana between 2014 and 2017. We hypothesized that (i) elephant home ranges would be larger in the wet than in the dry season (because critical resources tend to be less localized in the wet than in the dry season), (ii) the daily distance of the elephants to the nearest ephemeral surface water sources would be larger in the dry than in the wet season because many of the ephemeral water sources would be dry in the dry season and elephants would start moving towards permanent water sources such as rivers, and lastly (iii) that the differences in elephant home ranges and daily distance to water would differ between sexes. Our results showed that elephant home ranges were larger in the wet than in the dry season, and that they differed between sexes with female elephants having smaller home ranges in the late wet season. The mean daily distance to the nearest ephemeral surface water sources was larger in the dry than in the wet season. There was an inverse relationship between elephants' daily distance to permanent surface water and to ephemeral water sources. The findings indicate the need for large conservation areas and functional connectivity between landscapes to enable the highly mobile savanna elephants to access critical seasonal resources such as water and forage in semi‐arid savannas. Such landscapes are critical, especially in the face of climate change, when high air temperatures and droughts may exacerbate forage and water shortage and intensify human–elephant interactions in surrounding agroecosystems.

Elephants frequently raid crops within their ranges in Africa and Asia. These raids can greatly impact agricultural productivity and food security for farmers. Therefore, there is a need to explore cost‐effective measures that would reduce the susceptibility of crops and agricultural fields to elephant raiding, and further promote sustainable human–elephant coexistence. Previous studies have examined the susceptibility of crop fields to elephant raids using field characteristics such as field size and proximity to water sources. However, there are limited studies investigating how different crop types, individually and in their combinations, influence crop susceptibility to elephant raiding. This study utilized data collected from crop fields raided by the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) between 2008 and 2018 in the eastern Okavango Panhandle, northern Botswana. Data on crops grown, number of crop‐raiding incidences for each crop, and elephant raiding incidences were recorded for each field assessed. Incidence risks (IR) and field risk value (RV) were computed using an adaptive epidemiological approach. The results showed that elephant raiding incidents varied significantly amongst crop types over space and time (p < .0001). Cereal crops (millet: Eleusine conaracana, maize: Zea mays) incurred a higher number of crop‐raiding incidents compared with leguminous crops (cowpea: Vigna unguiculata; groundnut: Arachis hypogea). Field RVs significantly varied depending on which crop was present in the field. There was a significant negative correlation between the number of crop types and the susceptibility of the field to raiding (r = −0.680, p < .0001). Our results suggest that the susceptibility of the fields to elephant raids could be minimized by selecting crop types and combinations less susceptible to elephant damage, thus enhancing food security for local subsistence farmers.