Climate and resilience blog posts

Many traditional farming communities adopt new crops and varieties, while retaining the ones that are already there. As this change is a managed change, farmers are actually improving to the resilience of agricultural systems.

In our globalised society, there are virtually no ecosystems that are not shaped by people, and no human being can survive without the services ecosystems provide. A resilience thinking approach investigates how interacting systems of people and nature can best be managed in the face of disturbances, surprises and uncertainty.

As WLE invites partners to embark on a month-long blog discussion of Resilience, I would like to share an experience that galvanized my conceptual thinking around resilience.

For the first time, in the latest assessment of the IPCC on impacts and adaptation, there is a much greater recognition that for poor people living precarious lives, things look much more complicated than they do in climate models. It is a breath of fresh air.

Scientists are asked to change, to ensure their research leads to concrete outcomes. As communicators, how can we change to support this push towards outcome-based research?

Season's Greetings from the Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog Team. We'll be taking a holiday break until January 2014. See you in the new year!

Participants at the Global Landscapes Forum discussed ways to make “climate-smart” agricultural development more attractive to investors and policy makers - highlighting an example of IWMI research influencing investors in Nepal.

Climate diplomats half way through two weeks of deliberations aimed at delivering a new global treaty to tackle climate change, have reportedly simply walked away from the farming challenge.

International targets have been set for forest landscape restoration like the Bonn Challenge that aims to restore 150 hectares of lost forest and degraded land by 2020. But, how are these global targets going to be translated into tangible action on the ground?

Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration has made a tremendous impact across swaths of West and East Africa where trees had been cleared for agriculture. Now through proper pruning and protection, these trees could grow back, and in turn support entire ecosystem and increase food production.

How can development and poverty-alleviation focused investments be shaped to sustain landscapes and livelihoods to achieve the SDG’s? Find out at WLE and CIAT hosted session during the Global Landscapes Forum where researchers and investors are brought together to discuss.

To mitigate risks of ecosystem service degradation, we need to ensure that tradeoffs are managed through informed land use, especially in high potential agricultural areas, such as the Guinea Savanna zone in Africa.