Governance and policy blog posts

Unlike transportation, medicine, and even dam-building — all of which have experienced game-changing technological innovations during the past half century — canal irrigation has remained largely a technologically stagnant sector since the days of the Green Revolution

How to kill a nation’s rivers. I visited Poland, where they are doing just that. It is a terrifying lesson for the many other nations worried about floods and determined to engineer their way to a solution. Thailand, among others, please listen. There is a better way.

As scientists strategize about how best to introduce a holistic, “landscapes” approach to balance tradeoffs between conservation and development, policymakers and practitioners are considering how they can “invest” in landscapes, and whether they can be billed as investment opportunities.

Lack of available water in the West Bank and Gaza Strip threatens the livelihoods of thousands of families dependent upon agriculture for their livelihoods. FAO finds rehabilitation of cisterns to be one cost effective method to improve access to water.

In India, millions of the poorest and vulnerable people make their living on common land. But nearly one-third of land in India is degraded and common lands face many pressures including: loss of ground cover, falling water tables and declining soil fertility.

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.

Engaging female farmers in Nepal is an increasingly important component of climate change adaptation strategies, highlights new IWMI book, Tackling Change, on climate change adaptation and agricultural water management.

A couple of years ago, Oxfam claimed that an area of agricultural land in developing countries almost the size of Western Europe had in recent years been taken over the foreign investors. A new report says a majority of the biggest “land grabs” never got beyond the planning stage. Is the great land rush over?

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?

Knowing that landscapes are used by different people for different purposes is one step in deciding how to design more effective and equitable interventions. But paying attention to gender and social differences when designing landscape-scale approaches is not the same as achieving gender equity.

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.