Africa’s Catholic bishops have criticized the appropriation of land;natural resources and other economic assets by private companies and called on national governments to show greater concern for local community rights and needs. They said: ‘The impunity of corporate and elite capture of African land and natural resources and the damage this is doing to Africa’s food systems;to our environment;our soils;lands and water;our biodiversity;our nutrition and health is a major concern.

Humans have been adapting to their environments throughout history by developing practices, cultures and livelihoods suited to local conditions – from the Mediterranean siesta to the Vietnamese practice of building homes on stilts to protect against monsoonal rains. However, climate change raises the possibility that existing societies will experience climatic shifts (in temperature, storm frequency, flooding and other factors) that previous experience has not prepared them for.

Agricultural innovation scaling approaches tend to be empirical but do not sufficiently take into account the complex realities of ‘softer elements’ such as people, supply chains, markets, financing mechanisms, policies and regulations, professional knowledge, power relations, incentives and history. As a consequence, scaling initiatives often do not produce the desired impacts and, in some instances, may even produce undesirable impacts.

Palm oil is an important commodity contributing to livelihoods of many communities, GDP of governments and the achievement of several sustainable development goals (SDG) including no poverty, zero hunger, and decent work and economic growth. However, its cultivation and continuous expansion due to high and increasing demand has led to many negative effects and subsequent calls to make production sustainable. To this end, information is needed to understand the negative and positive impacts on both the environment and human wellbeing to respond appropriately.

County Climate Risk Profiles are a key tool to guide climate smart agriculture (CSA) investments and priorities at the county level in Kenya. These documents provide analyses of the underlying causes of vulnerability and on-going and potential climate change adaptation strategies. They also provide a snapshot of the enabling environment for building resilience by providing a synthesis of the policy, institutional and governance context.

Landscape restoration initiatives often have the potential to result in environmental gains, but the question of whether these gains are sustainable and how they are linked to other community needs (social, productivity and economic gains) remains unclear. We use the Sustainable Intensification Assessment Framework (SIAF) to demonstrate how environmental benefits are linked to productivity, environment, social, human, and economic components. Using the SIAF, the standardization of relevant indicators across multiple objectives provided a contextual representation of sustainability.

By 2050, the United Nations projects that 68 percent of the world population will live in cities (UN DESA 2019). However, with continuous population growth, the number of people living in rural areas of many low- and low-middle-income countries (LMICs) will continue to rise. Two- thirds of the extreme poor live in rural areas (World Bank 2016) and the livelihoods of two to three billion rural people, often the most food in-secure and vulnerable, still depend primarly on small farms (Laborde, Parent, and Smaller 2020; Woodhill, Hasnain, and Griffith 2020).

To increase understanding of agricultural intensification processes over time and their sustainability, we studied dimensions of sustainability in the context of ongoing expansion of intensive, commercial mono-cropping of banana in Southwestern Uganda. In our approach we considered five dimensions of sustainability: economic, agricultural productivity, environment, social and human. We compared farming systems in 1998 and 2018 and integrated a gender lens.

County Climate Risk Profiles are a key tool to guide climate smart agriculture (CSA) investments and priorities at the county level in Kenya. These documents provide analyses of the underlying causes of vulnerability and on-going and potential climate change adaptation strategies. They also provide a snapshot of the enabling environment for building resilience by providing a synthesis of the policy, institutional and governance context.

County Climate Risk Profiles are a key tool to guide climate smart agriculture (CSA) investments and priorities at the county level in Kenya. These documents provide analyses of the underlying causes of vulnerability and on-going and potential climate change adaptation strategies. They also provide a snapshot of the enabling environment for building resilience by providing a synthesis of the policy, institutional and governance context.

From COVID-19 to emerging crop diseases and exotic pests that threaten natural ecosystems, invasive species are a major problem globally. Invasive populations, such as antibiotic- or pesticide-resistant genotypes or new pathotypes, are also a serious challenge. Desirable populations, such as improved crop varieties and endangered species, also have the potential to spread under the right conditions. Successful seed systems may require both types of management: supporting the spread of new crop varieties and stopping or slowing the spread of seedborne pathogens.

Abstract. Drought is predicted to increase in the future due to climate change, bringing with it myriad impacts on ecosystems. Plants respond to drier soils by reducing stomatal conductance in order to conserve water and avoid hydraulic damage. Despite the importance of plant drought responses for the global carbon cycle and local and regional climate feedbacks, land surface models are unable to capture observed plant responses to soil moisture stress.