Sustainable agriculture faces a constellation of ever-shifting challenges. Our world’s population grows toward ten billion, but there is now indisputable evidence of multiple serious social and environmental impacts caused by current agricultural and food systems. We are fast approaching our limits. And there is an urgency to assure our solutions can meet new challenges – demographic shifts, urbanization and consumption patterns. And of course climate change, which may just tip our systems over.

And who stands to bear the brunt of these risks? It’s the most vulnerable. Smallholders in the developing world, many of whom are women. Youth. Indigenous peoples. The poor. All face a world veering into the unknown, and all have limited resources to respond.

But as vexing as these challenges seem, new solutions are arising. We are finding new ways to manage resources. New technologies to harness water are scaling. Data is being collected at farm to global levels, feeding into better decisions. Cutting-edge practices and technologies are re-greening degraded lands. Women are better targeted through improved investments. And WLE is moving these pockets of innovation toward policy and institutional change. But much more needs to be done to transform our food systems.

So have our challenges finally met their match? WLE is leading the way on resolving three of CGIAR’s global challenges: Living within PLANETARY BOUNDARIES, sustaining FOOD AVAILABILITY and promoting EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY. Here, we highlight 10 key results – all realized through WLE support. And all prove that we can find our way past these global challenges through better natural resource decisions.

Our partners have helped us improve FOOD AVAILABILITY, while living within our PLANETARY BOUNDARIES, by supporting massive new investments in solar irrigation, developing a water scarcity indicator adopted by the UN, rolling out a soil data system across sub-Saharan Africa, and developing sustainable land use alternatives for an incentive scheme to preserve the Amazon rainforest. We’ve also been feeding real-time drought data into government decisions, supporting a data platform to find better water sources, and developed recommendations for how to use otherwise destructive floodwaters to irrigate forages and crops.

Moving towards EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY, WLE partners influenced irrigation investments to directly target women and engaged with universities to bring wealth-from-waste business models to young professionals.

And to help guide us through interconnected challenges, WLE is establishing a commission on sustainable intensification of agriculture.

These 10 solutions are but a few highlights from across the WLE portfolio. But each has the potential to scale out and to serve as guideposts for problem-solvers, at a local to global scale.

As tough as our challenges seem, we are making progress. With the right research, investments and political support, we can produce enough nutritional food in an equitable way, while restoring and improving our planet. Indeed, our challenges have begun to meet their match!

Izabella Koziell

Program Director, CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE)