I was delighted to retrieve on this blog the three main messages from this year's 9-year old CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food, namely sustainable intensification, better sharing of benefits and risks, and improved institutional cooperation. These messages do not come out from the blue. These messages build upon the CPWF's core messages and the Basin Focal Project Work
By joining WLE, we bring, with more than 200 partners, our experience of research successfully translated into development outcomes in those three areas. Be it diversification in the Ganges Basin with improved rice yields in the wet seasons as well as off-season opportunities for crops such as sunflowers, public-private partnerships in the Andes that enabled sharing benefits between different water users both improving livelihoods and protecting the environment, or gathering Ministers of the Mekong riparian countries on a dialogue to develop sustainable hydropower, our unique development-oriented experience is what we hope will help WLE have a successful inception.
Of course, the research activities within WLE's Strategic Research Portfolios (SRPs) will work on different elements of these messages. From CPWF's experience it is important to identify specific development issues and bottlenecks in the geographic regions (landscape, river basins, etc) where WLE operates. If research is going to have impact, it will need to engage with partners and actors in specific areas over long periods of time. Development is more messy and complicated than linear research models of dissemination.
For example, improved institutional arrangements to support sustainable intensification will obviously not be same in the Mekong river basin where the massive development of dams for hydropower is a major driver threatening livelihoods of the poor relying upon fisheries, as in the Limpopo river basin where climate change pushes poor communities to innovative ways of developing livestock markets supported by improved rangeland and rainwater management. And of course by doing this, we should never forget whom we work for: the poor and vulnerable. Their improved lives should always remain our central top-end outcome.
We are excited to work with SRP leaders towards these goals and make linkages to our wide network !
I was delighted to retrieve on this blog the three main messages from this year's 9-year old CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food, namely sustainable intensification, better sharing of benefits and risks, and improved institutional cooperation. These messages do not come out from the blue. These messages build upon the CPWF's core messages and the Basin Focal Project Work
By joining WLE, we bring, with more than 200 partners, our experience of research successfully translated into development outcomes in those three areas. Be it diversification in the Ganges Basin with improved rice yields in the wet seasons as well as off-season opportunities for crops such as sunflowers, public-private partnerships in the Andes that enabled sharing benefits between different water users both improving livelihoods and protecting the environment, or gathering Ministers of the Mekong riparian countries on a dialogue to develop sustainable hydropower, our unique development-oriented experience is what we hope will help WLE have a successful inception.
Of course, the research activities within WLE's Strategic Research Portfolios (SRPs) will work on different elements of these messages. From CPWF's experience it is important to identify specific development issues and bottlenecks in the geographic regions (landscape, river basins, etc) where WLE operates. If research is going to have impact, it will need to engage with partners and actors in specific areas over long periods of time. Development is more messy and complicated than linear research models of dissemination.
For example, improved institutional arrangements to support sustainable intensification will obviously not be same in the Mekong river basin where the massive development of dams for hydropower is a major driver threatening livelihoods of the poor relying upon fisheries, as in the Limpopo river basin where climate change pushes poor communities to innovative ways of developing livestock markets supported by improved rangeland and rainwater management. And of course by doing this, we should never forget whom we work for: the poor and vulnerable. Their improved lives should always remain our central top-end outcome.
We are excited to work with SRP leaders towards these goals and make linkages to our wide network !