Cambodia has abundant water resources in general, but it has a little water in the dry season. The increased dry season rice farming in many provinces, following the increased rice export policy in Cambodia and the spill-over effects of rice trade in Vietnam has led to high demands for water for dry season rice farming. These have led to water shortage and conflicts over water among farmers in the farming provinces, and between sectors, for instance, fishery and rice farming.

This study conducted a participatory appraisal of climate vulnerabilities and conflict risks five communities across Senegal: 1) pastoral, agro-pastoral and farming communities in the drylands areas of Louga 2) farmer and agro-pastoral communities in Kaffrine, 3) fishing communities on the islands of the coastal area of Casamance, 4) relocated fishing communities in Saint Louis, and 5) displaced farming communities in the tropical forests of Casamance.

This study evaluates the socioecological consequences of the potential trade-offs between maintaining environmental flows (e-flows) and providing water for sustainable subsistence agriculture and livelihoods to the vulnerable human communities living along the lower Great Letaba River in South Africa. Implementation of e-flows is now generally recognized as an essential part of water resources management as they are designed to ensure that sufficient water is retained in a river to protect river ecosystems and all the beneficiaries of services that arise from those ecosystems.

Generative large language models (LLMs), while widely accessible and capable of simulating policy recommendations, pose challenges in the assessment of their accuracy. Users, including policy analysts and decision-makers, bear the responsibility of evaluating the outcomes from these models. A significant limitation of LLMs is their potential to overlook critical, context-specific factors. For example, in formulating food policies, it is vital to consider regional climate and environmental variables that influence water and resource availability.

Increasing demand for water juxtaposed with shrinking supplies will require a transfer of water resources out of agriculture into the domestic, industrial, and ideally environmental sectors. To examine the potential of policies to facilitate a release of water from agriculture, this paper uses IFPRI’s Computable General Equilibrium Model with a water extension, CGE-W, to assess the impact of commodity taxes on two highly water consumptive crops, rice and sugarcane, on water consumption and the overall economy.

Maize production in Zambia must increase with a view towards improved food security and reduced food imports whilst avoiding cropland expansion. To achieve this, it is important to understand the causes behind the large maize yield gaps observed in smallholder farming systems across the country. This is the first study providing a yield gap decomposition for maize in Zambia, and combining it with farm typology delineation, to identify the key limiting factors to maize yield gaps across the diversity of farms in the country.

The climate crisis is increasing security risks in Jordan. Of the manifold risks Jordan must contend with, most pressing are those with direct implications for water resources which are already under significant strain due to both climatic and human-induced factors. Higher temperatures are leading to more evapotranspiration and reduced rainfall are especially critical, straining the groundwater and aquifer reserves that are already over exploited. Extreme weather events and their impacts, including droughts, flash floods, and landslides, further complicate matters.

This report delves into the essential task of gathering validation data, focusing on surface and groundwater related data monitoring through the deployment of field equipment. The primary objective is to comprehensively monitor surface water and groundwater levels, along with rainfall, on a regular basis. This hydrologic monitoring initiative is conducted within the context of a case study centered on rice-fish systems, specifically community fish refuges (CFRs) in Prey Veng Province, Cambodia.

This publication, Water Quality in Agriculture: Risks and Risk Mitigation, emphasizes technical solutions and good agricultural practices, including risk mitigation measures suitable for the contexts of differently resourced institutions working in rural as well as urban and peri-urban settings in low- and middle-income countries. With a focus on sustainability of the overall land use system, the guidelines also cover possible downstream impacts of farm-level decisions.

Consequences of global climate change are predicted to increase risks to crop production in the future. However, the possible broader impact of climate change on social-ecological systems still needs to be evaluated. Therefore, the present study focuses on one such globally important agricultural social-ecological system referred to as the Village Tank Cascade System (VTCS) in the dry zone of Sri Lanka. The VTCS has considerable potential to withstand seasonal climate variability mainly through continuous supply of water by the village tank storage throughout the year.

An ecosystem is inhabited by organisms that rely on it for their livelihoods. For an ecosystem to sustain life, its life-supporting components must be alive to be able to preserve both the ecosystem’s life-supporting components like soil, vegetation, water, etc., and the living organisms inhabiting the ecosystem like humans, birds, domestic, and wild animals, termed as the One-Health concept. This is indispensable for the sustainability of life. Several factors determine the ability of the ecosystem to provide ecosystem services and support life, more so amidst climate change.

This report summarizes the development of the Afghanistan Drought Early Warning Decision Support (AF-DEWS) Tool, a cloud-based online platform with near real-time information on drought conditions, to provide decision-makers with maps and data to enable further analysis. The report provides an overview of how the AF-DEWS Tool was developed and how it can be used to systematically monitor, detect and forecast drought conditions in Afghanistan.