Smallholder farming in the southern African region is characterised by low agricultural production and productivity, whereas food and nutrition insecurity is characterised by an insecure livelihood activity for most people who depend on it. The challenge confronting the sector is to increase food production and its incomeearning capacity under an increasingly complex climatic environment. Climate change has compounded existing challenges constraining ambition to improve agricultural productivity and the welfare of smallholder farmers even further.

Introduction. In the world, 33% of soils are degraded, and 2.9 million people are affected by land degradation, with problems associated with food security, conflicts over natural resources, and migration with different impacts on men or women. To support sustainable soil management, it is necessary to include women's contributions to soil Sciences; their achievements and academic performance still need to be represented. Women in Science represent 30% worldwide. In Mexico, only 24 % of top academic positions are women.

Land degradation is one of the contemporary environmental challenges affecting regions inhabited by over one-third of the global population. In response to land degradation, restoration of degraded landscapes through area closure has been implemented through government and bilateral organizations for the last three decades in Ethiopia.

Evaluation of the hydrological impact of urbanization-induced land use land cover (LULC) changes for medium to large catchments is still an important research topic due to the lack of evidence to conclude about how local changes translate to impacts across scales. This study aims to provide evidence on the effects of LULC change on the streamflow of the Akaki catchment that hosts Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia.

Understanding the genetic and molecular function of nitrate sensing and acquisition across crop species will accelerate breeding of cultivars with improved nitrogen use efficiency (NUE).
Here, we performed a genome-wide scan using wheat and barley accessions characterized under low and high N inputs that uncovered the NPF2.12 gene, encoding a homolog of the Arabidopsis nitrate transceptor NRT1.6 and other low-affinity nitrate transporters that belong to the MAJOR FACILITATOR SUPERFAMILY.

Agriculture faces the competing challenges of enhancing productivity and raising the incomes of smallholder farmers, while simultaneously also addressing concerns related to environmental sustainability. Digital technologies have the potential to tackle these challenges and transform agri food systems in unprecedented ways. This policy brief advocates for the conceptualisation and development of digital public infrastructure for agriculture for a more equitable and responsible development pathway for agriculture in the G20 countries.

Rainfed agriculture is at the centre of many West African economies and a key livelihood strategy in the region. Highly variable rainfall patterns lead to a situation in which farmers’ investments to increase productivity are very risky and will become more risky with climate change. Process-based cropping system models are a key tool to assess the impact of weather variability and climate change, as well as the effect of crop management options on crop yields, soil fertility and farming system resilience and widely used by the West African scientific community.

Are the forest conservation practices sustained after Payment for Environmental Services (PES) programmes end? Using a sample of 268 (former) PES recipients and non-recipients from the Budongo-Bugoma PES programme in Western Uganda, we employ the before-after-control–intervention (difference-in-difference) approach to estimate the PES programme outcome on their privately owned forests. PES is associated with less deforestation during the operational period, but the link has vanished four years after programme termination.

Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) is a predominant food security crop in several developing countries. Its storage roots, rich in carbohydrate, are deficient in essential micronutrients, including provitamin A carotenoids.
Increasing carotenoid content in cassava storage roots is important to reduce the incidence of vitamin A deficiency, a public health problem in sub-Saharan Africa. However, cassava improvement advances slowly, mainly due to limited information on the molecular factors influencing β-carotene accumulation in cassava.

Present global maps of soil water retention (SWR) are mostly derived from pedotransfer functions (PTFs) applied to maps of other basic soil properties. As an alternative, ‘point-based’ mapping of soil water content can improve global soil data availability and quality. We developed point-based global maps with estimated uncertainty of the volumetric SWR at 100, 330 and 15 000 cm suction using measured SWR data extracted from the WoSIS Soil Profile Database together with data estimated by a random forest PTF (PTF-RF).

The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), The Amhara Regional Agricultural Research Institute (ARARI), the Accelerating the Impact of CGIAR Climate Research in Africa (AICCRA), and the Amhara Livestock and Fisheries Resource Development Office organized a workshop that took place on May 29, 2023, in Bahir Dar Ethiopia.