In response to the escalating waste management challenges triggered by rapid urbanization and its effects on resource use and the environment a Circular Bioeconomy Innovation Hub (CBE-IH) has been set-up in Ghana, under the leadership and facilitation of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) with the support of CGIAR Initiatives Resilient Cities and Nature Positive Solutions.

As part of the 19th Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), held on 28th October-2nd November 2023 at Palais des Congres in Yaounde, Cameroon, partners of AICCRA (Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa) RUFORUM and WASCAL have organized a side event entitled “Accelerating and scaling up Africa’s climate change adaptation and mitigation actions”.

With limited arable land and increasing
population, India faces a unique challenge in
ensuring food and nutrition security, especially
as climate change intensifies. Access to high
quality seeds of improved crop varieties is
critical for enhancing agricultural production
and productivity and ensuring food security.
But as access to such quality seeds from
the formal sector is limited, many of the
smallholder farmers are forced to rely on
farmer-saved seeds. The Government of India

Climate change has intensified food security challenges, especially in Africa, where a significant portion of produce is reliant on smallholder farmers in rainfed conditions. Prolonged flooding and droughts, driven by erratic weather patterns, have significantly elevated the risk of food scarcity. Floods, in particular, have been responsible for severe crop losses, raising concerns about increasing import costs if this issue is not mitigated. Africa is actively working to mitigate the impacts of flooding and enhance food security, although progress has been gradual.

The importance of improving the FAIRness (findability, accessibility, interoperability, reusability) of research data is undeniable, especially in the face of large, complex datasets currently being produced by omics technologies. Facilitating the integration of a dataset with other types of data increases the likelihood of reuse, and the potential of answering novel research questions. Ontologies are a useful tool for semantically tagging datasets as adding relevant metadata increases the understanding of how data was produced and increases its interoperability.

Over the last decades, the government of Ethiopia has taken several measures to achieve food security for its population. However, crop production is still below the optimal possible. Studies show that wheat, maize, and sorghum yields in Ethiopia are about 26.8, 19.7, and 29.3 % of their water-limited yield potentials. Some legumes such as common bean even experience higher yield gap of 35.5%. These indicate the potential for increasing productivity of crops in the country through addressing the key bottlenecks. Several factors play important role in determining crop yields in the country.

This work was supported by CGIAR’s HER+ research initiative which identifies and tests climate solutions that do work—and work in specific and practical ways—for women as well as men, bringing to the fore evidence of best practices and lessons learned. It was also supported by the CGIAR Initiative on Sustainable Animal Productivity, Nutrition and Gender Inclusion (SAPLING). CGIAR research is supported by contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund. CGIAR is a global research partnership for a food-secure future dedicated to transforming food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis.

The Index-based flood insurance (IBFI) is one of the outputs of the research under the initiative on Diversification in East and South Africa (UU), Work Package two (WP2): Bundling climate insurance solutions focusing on a case study in districts in Southern part of Zambia. This research was developed by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) co-designed with an insurance institution and insurance product developers and co-implemented with the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU) of Zambia.

As part of the AICCRA, the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) are tasked to develop curricula and training materials to accelerate the mainstreaming of Climate Information Services (CIS) and Climate- Smart Agriculture (CSA) into University’s curricula in Africa. This report describes the activities of a training of trainers’ (ToT) workshop on Climate Smart Nutrient and Water Management in Crop Production course module .

Wheat productivity in Ethiopia is low compared to countries potential yield. This is due to lack of context-specific good crop management practices. Using machine learning techniques, Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (ABC) and its partners, developed season-smart and site-specific fertilizer recommendation (SSFR) that can be used to improve wheat productivity in Ethiopia. ABC and Digital Green co-piloted to assess the performance of the SSFR on farmers field in 2022/23 main crop season in Amhara, Oromia and SSNP regions in Ethiopia.

Potato is an important crop in Uzbekistan agriculture for multiple reasons. It contributes to food security and nutrition quality. This crop has been facing pests and diseases with limited efforts to address these issues. This rapid assessment conducted in spring 2023 helps to fill the gap in how the potato seed system is organized and functioning. We used the multi-stakeholder framework to collect information from key actors involved in the potato value chain. Our results show relatively weak ties among all the stakeholders.

Abstract Globally, land and seascapes across the bioculturally diverse tropics are in transition. Impacted by the demands of distant consumers, the processes of global environmental change and numerous interventions seeking climate, conservation and development goals, these transitions have the potential to impact the relationships and plurality of values held between people and place. This paper is a Synthesis of seven empirical studies within the Special Feature (SF): ‘What is lost in transition?