Background | The challenges facing food, land, and water systems are numerous and complex. In addressing these interlinked challenges, the choices facing governments and their development partners have also become increasingly complicated. Synergies are possible, but trade-offs are often unavoidable. Decision-makers need better evidence to help them choose actions that minimize trade-offs and advance progress towards collective goals.

CONTEXT: Global and national agricultural development policies normally tend to focus more on enhancing farm productivity through technological changes than on better use of existing technologies. The role of improving technical efficiency in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction from crop production is the least explored area in the agricultural sector. But improving technical efficiency is necessary in the context of the limited availability of existing natural resources (particularly land and water) and the need for GHG emission reduction from the agriculture sector.

Abstract: Flood-attributed damages to infrastructure and public safety are expected to escalate in the future due to climate change, land use change, and associated hydrologic changes. In recent years, the reliability of flood forecasts has increased due to the availability of meteorological and hydrological data and advancements in flood prediction science. However, there is limited effort to apply emerging advanced hydrological models for flood prediction in poorly gauged watersheds.

This series of socio-legal reviews summarizes the legal and policy documents related to women’s land tenure in seven countries: Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, The Gambia, Ethiopia, Niger, Bangladesh, and Colombia. These synthesis documents, part of the IFAD Initiative on Women’s Resource Rights, are designed for researchers and policymakers seeking to improve women’s land and resource rights in these target countries.

In this Occasional Paper, we compare a national approach designed to address restoration (the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program, CFLRP, of the United States Department of Agriculture/United States Forest Service) with CIFOR’s Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM) approach, which was originally designed to encourage sustainable forest management (SFM). CIFOR’s version of SFM included equal parts forestry, ecology and human well-being, and in this case focused on the community level.

Assam has rich soil and good natural resources for implementing climate-resilient agricultural practices to enhance potato production. Potato cultivation in the district occupies 1,03,812 hectares of land which, in 2015-2016, produced about 6,94,002 metric tons of potatoes as recorded by the Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Government of Assam1. This is quite low compared to the national average of 22 metric tons per hectare (NHB 2018).

Identifying the biophysical factors that affect the performance of irrigated crops in semi-arid conditions is pivotal to the success of profitable and sustainable agriculture under variable climate conditions. In this study, soil physical and chemical variables and plots characteristics were used through linear mixed and random forestbased modeling to evaluate the determinants of actual evapotranspiration (ETa) and crop water productivity (CWP) in rice in the Kou Valley irrigated scheme in Burkina Faso.

Rice production in Asia and Africa has faced labor shortages and climate change issues such as unanticipated droughts and
floods, causing unstable yields and a high risk of crop losses. In addition, low farming efficiency, high carbon footprint,
and high postharvest losses are the major constraints in rice production. Low farming efficiency (high energy and
labor cost and agronomic input use) is mainly caused by poor land consolidation, lack of precision land leveling, crop

Agrarian change affects the supply and demand of ecosystem services (ES) by reducing the extent of natural ecosystems. Agricultural intensification can lead to changes in land covers and livelihood opportunities and it remains unclear how such changes align or misalign with the desires of local communities.

In December 2022, over 190 nations gathered in Montreal, Canada to finalize the Global Biodiversity Framework, an ambitious plan to save the Earth’s biodiversity. The United Nations Global Biodiversity Conference, or COP15, concluded with 23 ambitious targets ranging from land restoration and conservation to promoting sustainable consumption.