Watershed based management of natural resources for improved productivity and sustained environmental services

Issues related to conservation and sustainable utilization of land and water resources can be addressed well when studies extend their scope beyond agricultural lands to include other units in the landscape because of the interconnections and linkages between these land units within the landscape. It is with this realization that watershed management has emerged as an important option for conservation and efficient use of available resources. Within Africa, Ethiopia has adopted and promoting IWM as a means to achieve sustainable intensification. Despite many successful IWM initiatives, there is a lack of systematic documentation on how these initiatives are contributing to productivity and more importantly environmental consequences. The evidence of success with IWM in Ethiopia and many other parts of the world is largely empirical and site specific. The proposed work is an effort to make more systematic and comprehensive assessment of these initiatives to increase the scientific understanding of how IWM programs are contributing to sustainable intensification through higher yields and lower environmental impacts, while developing models for scaling up. Some of the outstanding issues that we propose to address are: • What are the immediate and long-term consequences of IWM both on productivity and environmental performance including impacts of climate change • What is the additional productive potential created and what is required to realize the potential sustainably • How the use efficiency of land, investments and labor has changed and what can be done to maximize the same • What are the tradeoffs between livelihoods and environmental benefits • What are the potential upstream-downstream interface issues and options to manage them • What are the surface and groundwater interactions and potential for their utilization • How the benefits from IWM were shared equitably and fairly among a variety of community stakeholders including gender and age groups • What makes replication of successful models in Ethiopia and beyond work