This brief shows how innovative financing can help cut agricultural pollution in the People's Republic of China’s Xin'an River Basin by plugging funding gaps for nature-based solutions that also mitigate against climate change. It highlights the importance of the basin that supplies drinking water to 10 million people and explains how insufficient financing is limiting the effectiveness of existing ecological compensation schemes.

This document reports on preliminary findings from a household survey conducted in Meru County under the auspices of the Innovation for African Climate Risk Insurance (INACRI). The project aims to develop an improved crop insurance index that addresses basis risk inter alia for small scale maize farmers. The goal of the household survey was to assess farmer’s production risks, crop insurance needs and willingness to adopt crop insurance. We also assess farmer’s financial and insurance literacy as a robustness check for their preferences for insurance.

East African highland banana (Musa acuminata genome group AAA-EA; hereafter referred to as banana) is critical for Uganda’s food supply, hence our aim to map current distribution and to understand changes in banana production areas over the past five decades. We collected banana presence/absence data through an online survey based on high-resolution satellite images and coupled this data with independent covariates as inputs for ensemble machine learning prediction of current banana distribution.

This paper takes a first step in filling that gap in terms of assessing whether there is evidence to support proposals about how agricultural innovation pathways should be pursued. We have looked at the recent literature that proposes principles and approaches to achieving large-scale sustainable agriculture intensification (SAI), and disaggregated these all-inclusive approaches into individual components and hypotheses. We then tested six hypotheses through case studies of innovation pathways, trajectories, scaling and other attempts at achieving large-scale SAI.

This report is part of the documentation component of Work package 3 of the foresight and metrics initiative supporting the Documentation and improved access to standardized, regularly updated, and interoperable versions of CGIAR’s core foresight models, tools, and databases spanning food, land and water systems.

This project aims at contributing to the UN resolution 2/24 on combating desertification, land degradation and drought and promoting sustainable pastoralism and rangelands; and UN resolution 4/15 on innovations in sustainable rangelands and pastoralism, as well as the UNEP-led gap analysis on rangelands and the resulting report: Rangelands: A case of benign neglect.

Despite the potential importance of seed quality to agricultural productivity growth, many governments in sub-Saharan Africa lack the capacity to expand quality assurance systems even where there is expressed interest. This study aims to evidence the value of quality assurance systems with an analysis of efforts to produce and distribute certified seed in Nigeria.

The combination of inadequate understanding of the dynamics in rangeland ecosystems and local livelihood systems are to blame for the inappropriate policy actions, unabated rangeland degradation trends, impoverishment of communities living in the rangelands, and their increased vulnerability to various shocks including climate change. The root cause of these problems is mainly linked to lack of inadequate skilled human resources, trained in rangeland ecosystem management at the postgraduate level, to tackle the complex biodiversity interactions in the rangeland ecosystems.

In 2005, India passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, “the Act”), a law guaranteeing all rural households 100 days of work at a minimum wage through the building of durable assets, which created one of the largest anti-poverty programs in the world. Now known as the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA (MGNREGA), a notable feature of the program is that it envisions a democratic, bottom-up process of choosing which durable assets would be built within a community.

Degradation of socio-ecological production landscapes (SEPLs) triggered mainly by the impoverishment of biodiversity and the increasing incidence of climate catastrophes significantly challenges human health and food and nutritional security. Critical concern needs to be placed on ensuring both human and ecosystem health and contributing to nutrition-sensitive local food production and protection of SEPLs.

Digital tools and technologies are transforming the way we monitor and manage food systems and natural resources, but to date there is scant credible collection and analysis of evidence of their impacts on well-being, environmental sustainability, and broader goods and services. The development of information communication technology (ICT) has a crucial role to play in the timely provision of information to guide management and investment decisions by small-scale fisheries (SSF) stakeholders, from coastal fishers to government officials.