A location-specific, tailored, season-smart agro-advisory decision support tool (DST) in the Highlands of Ethiopia increased wheat yields of smallholder farmers by up to 25% with an average partial profitability of USD 600 per ha per season. The data-driven DST was developed by integrating over 25,000 crop responses to fertilizer application datasets and corresponding biophysical co-variants, using machine learning algorithms. Currently, the DST is being piloted across the highlands of Ethiopia. Documented here, as part of INIT EIA Excellence in Agronomy.

Nematodes with their versatile lifestyles provide a suitable lens to decipher the conditions of agroecosystems, but less is known about how they are affected by bioinoculants and organic soil amendments. To test if treatments modify the nematode community, we studied nematode communities in two different apple orchards under organic and integrated farming. Soil was treated with products containing arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, bioeffectors, and organic amendments.

The Alternative Energy Promotion Centre (AEPC) offers subsidies for off-grid Solar Irrigation Pumps (SIPs) to promote sustainable irrigation practices. The utilization of these off-grid SIPs is low due to irrigation demand patterns. The potential for gridconnected solar irrigation is increasing as Nepal's national utility grid network grows. Nevertheless, despite net metering regulations, off-grid SIPs are not integrated into the national grid.

Climate change poses daunting challenges to agricultural production and food security. Rising temperatures, shifting weather patterns, and more frequent extreme events have already demonstrated their effects on local, regional, and global agricultural systems. Crop varieties that withstand climate-related stresses and are suitable for cultivation in innovative cropping systems will be crucial to maximize risk avoidance, productivity, and profitability under climate-changed environments.

In the last 25 years, almost 50 million hectares of primary forest have been lost due to deforestation. Numerous international initiatives such as the Bonn Challenge and the New York Declaration on Forests have set ambitious goals to restore degraded and deforested lands by 2030. Realizing global commitments on forest and landscape restoration (FLR) will require the establishment of billions of trees on millions of hectares of degraded land to address the triple crisis of biodiversity loss, climate change and failing food systems.

Bangladesh is the 7th most climate vulnerable country, and the impacts of this are largely shaped by water-related challenges in this deltaic country. The gendered dimensions of these challenges are poorly understood and addressed in technical interventions designed to mitigate and enable adaptation to climate impacts. A focus on gender (read women) is often limited to WASH interventions, or at best extends to women’s representation in irrigation water user associations.

Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition (MAATE) is using a Collect Earth Online through a service co-developed with EcoCiencia and SERVIR-Amazonia (an Alliance – led regional program) to improve forest monitoring data accuracy in the Ecuadorian Amazon and to validate National Monitoring System maps and land cover estimates. MAATE continues to improve the monitoring of forest degradation and to support the provinces and indigenous forest- dependent groups to use the data for decision making.

Through "Local Technical Agroclimatic Committees" (LTACs) and multiple media, timely Agro-Climatic Bulletins are being disseminated to over 130,000 farmers (520,000 beneficiaries) in 351 communities in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and South-Central Coast. Based on a sample survey of 202 farmers in one province, the use of this information has enabled farmers to increase their rice yields and revenue significantly. The LTAC model was developed in Latin America by CIAT and has been successfully adapted to the southeast Asian context.

Ecosystems provide a variety of ecosystem services and functions for mankind, and their sustainable use plays an important role in livelihoods. However, the resulting land degradation due to land use and land cover changes leads to loss of valuable ecosystems and associated ecosystem functions and services. This study takes two highly degraded watersheds, Aba-Bora and Guder, in Ethiopia and uses the value transfer valuation method to estimate changes in ecosystem service values.

Across Africa, banana bunchy top disease (BBTD) severely impacts banana production and livelihoods of millions of small-holder farmers. Mapping vulnerability of landscapes to monitor BBTD establishment and spread is crucial for proactive measures of disease exclusion. To highlight current and future risks of BBTD in Africa, using logistic regression, the relationship between 1160 field-observations from 14 BBTD surveys and environmental covariate maps was determined.

Enhancing Resilience and Advancing Climate Mitigation through a Community-Based Breeding Approach