After a decade of innovative science and impact, 2021 is the culminating year of the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE). We are continuing to build momentum and working with our indispensable partners to ensure that agricultural transformations persist and proliferate along more sustainable pathways. We are proud of the legacy we have established: a suite of proven solutions that countries and communities can adopt to address their development challenges, along with unique insights and experiences that will guide future research and the design and implementation of future solutions.
WLE has always followed a vision of a world where agriculture thrives within supportive, vibrant ecosystems while delivering enduring prosperity for farming communities.
In 2020 and 2021, this vision might often have seemed distant: COVID-19 and its socio-economic consequences, such as food shortages and rising poverty, combined with droughts, floods, continuing deforestation, biodiversity decline and soil degradation, bore little resemblance to that thriving world. Yet these challenges only reinforced the critical importance of such a vision and the research that flows from it.
Amid a new spirit of rethinking and renewing built infrastructure, our work on the natural infrastructure that complements it continues to gain global recognition.
As we transition to One CGIAR we are synthesizing this work under key themes, which are illustrated with a selection of research highlights below. Within each theme, we are also focusing on signs of positive change around the world, which are plentiful, despite all the disruptions of the past year. If global challenges to agriculture and ecosystems have grown, so has hope for our collective ability to build better food systems.
