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Land supplies multiple goods and services vital to humans and the environment. In the last decades, increasing evidence of growing land degradation are made apparent. A limited and depleting resource base, the reliance on climate-sensitive sectors and its large population, make South Asia highly vulnerable to climate change. Observed changes in climate include increases in temperature and increased monsoon variability and rainfall pattern leading to drought and flooding. Projected changes include increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, increasing cyclonic activity and higher variability of rainfall, all having enormous impacts on farming communities. At the same time, the region is rich in traditional agricultural knowledge (TAK), specialized in managing local agroecosystems to ensure food availability, tackling climatic risks and other ecological uncertainties. Particularly relevant is TAK related to land management to preserve soil fertility and avoid soil erosion. Ethnographic research is a valuable source of TAK, although this is rarely analysed with a climate change perspective. Based on a qualitative systematic review, and an expert's on-line survey, in this paper we review land management TAK and assess its potential for climate change adaptation. The review shows there is a vast amount of untapped TAK ethnographic research with potential for climate change adaptation.

Climate variations are considered one of several interacting factors affecting food security. Specifically, in the Indo-Gangetic Plains, increased exposure to droughts and floods are expected. Local traditional knowledge in agriculture (LTKA) is proposed in this article as valid knowledge to ensure food availability under climate change, given its long experience in dealing with climate variability. Focused on water strategies, we have conducted a literature review on LTKA practices in the Indo-Gangetic Plains complemented with a questionnaire of experts to identify LTKA-based practices that might be useful in climate-change driven water scenarios. The practices identified are categorized as a) water harvesting and recycling; b) local irrigation systems; and c) and maintenance, conservation, and water allocation. We found that a) despite acknowledging the potential of LTKA to face floods and droughts, very few studies explicitly make the link between LTKA and climate change; and b) LTKA in water management heavily relays on social norms and local institutions and, thus, any attempts to replicate it need to consider this. We conclude that agroecology can help to promote these practices since it emphasizes the collective management from below as the main approach for the design of sustainable agroecosystems and, thus, include local institutions as an essential strategy for adaptation.