Researchers from the Technical University of Madrid, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Harvard University have just published a paper in PLOS ONE which jointly assesses issues of future global food security and environmental outcomes. The study describes different future agricultural production pathways in one of the most important food baskets of the world: Latin America.
The Tana-Nairobi Water Fund is a public-private scheme uniting big business, utilities, conservation groups, government, researchers and farmers. It aims to increase farm productivity upstream, while improving water supply and cutting costs of hydropower and clean water for users downstream, and is designed to generate US$21.5 million in long-term benefits to Kenyan citizens, including farmers and businesses.
A recent study indicates that the total area under irrigation from groundwater resources in Africa can safely be expanded 20 times or more beyond current levels, but not everywhere. Farmers have already tapped into Africa’s groundwater, but mostly in the northern and southern regions. There is potential to sustainably increase the use of groundwater elsewhere in Africa, and in particular for small-scale farming.
New Snapshot Series: Partially treated sewage and industrial effluent is pumped into irrigation channels in Jajmau, a suburb of the Indian city of Kanpur. What isn’t used by farmers eventually flows into the Ganges, one of the country’s most polluted rivers.
They are the large overlooked agricultural potential: the extensive flood plains of Sub Saharan Africa. In Asian countries the flood plains are converted into food baskets and densely populated population hubs, in Africa the flood plains are largely unchartered terrain.
If tomorrow, all of East Africa’s wetlands disappeared, what costs would governments incur? While it is nearly impossible to place a quantitative value on wetlands, a new project is exploring methods of valuation of wetlands in the Nile Basin.
There are many gender mainstreaming workshops that take place each year. Few are successful at motivating behavior change. But a workshop in Gondar, Ethiopia was different. Some researchers came to argue that gender mainstreaming isn’t necessary. They left as supporters of the approach.
In the face of climate change managing water resources is becoming more difficult. In an effort to manage increased water variability, there is a competing discourse on the need for more built infrastructure (e.g. dams, canals and levees) to store and regulate water in order to support social and economic development and facilitate adaptation to climate change.
Something interesting is happening in Kenya – something that, if successful, could reverberate through Africa and transform the continent’s landscape management. Formerly all-powerful state agencies are handing over day-to-day control of key resources like forests, rivers and wildlife to local communities.
In a recent review of the SDGs, the goal on food security, improved nutrition and sustainable agriculture is a vast improvement over the MDGs, which did not consider agriculture at all. But, the SDGs fail to address important complementarities and tradeoffs among goals and their targets.
We’d like to present you with a summary of what’s been in scientific and popular literature this month on the theme of Ecosystem Services and Resilience.
Just one week before World Wetlands Day, at a meeting in Myanmar, Environment Ministers of the Greater Mekong Subregion reaffirmed their commitment to “green” economic growth. The challenge they recognized is ensuring not only sustainable growth but also inclusive and shared growth.
