Shodh Prabha: A Multidisciplinary Journal

Role of GeoAI in Climate-Smart Agriculture: Opportunities and Challenges

Climate change has created serious challenges for agricultural systems through rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, droughts, floods, soil degradation, pest outbreaks and increasing pressure on natural resources. In this context, climate-smart agriculture has emerged as an important approach for improving productivity, strengthening adaptation and supporting sustainable resource management. This paper examines the role of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in climate-smart agriculture, with special emphasis on its opportunities, challenges and policy relevance. GeoAI integrates geospatial technologies, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and spatial decision-support systems to generate location-specific agricultural information. The study highlights that GeoAI can support crop monitoring, yield prediction, drought and flood assessment, pest-risk detection, irrigation planning, soil-health analysis and climate-risk mapping. It also shows that GeoAI can improve precision resource management, early warning systems, crop insurance and evidence-based agricultural planning. However, the adoption of GeoAI faces several challenges, including data quality issues, model transferability, limited ground-truth data, weak digital literacy, fragmented landholdings, affordability concerns, geo-privacy risks and institutional gaps. The paper argues that GeoAI should not be treated merely as a technological tool, but as a spatial decision-support and climate-governance framework. Its success depends on inclusive digital infrastructure, responsible AI practices, local calibration, farmer participation and strong policy support. The study concludes that GeoAI can significantly contribute to climate-resilient and sustainable agriculture if implemented in a transparent, accessible and context-specific manner.