Drylands occupy more than 40% of the world’s land area and are home to some two billion people. This includes a disproportionate number of the world’s poorest people, who live in degraded and severely degraded landscapes. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification states on its website that 12 million hectares are lost annually to desertification and drought, and that more than 1.5 billion people are directly dependent on land that is being degraded, leading to US$42 billion in lost earnings each year.

Agricultural intensification is necessary to meet growing global food demand, but it has potential environmental costs. Some activities associated with intensification, including increased use of fertilizer and other chemical inputs, are documented to have direct negative impacts on air and water quality, soil fertility, and other parts of the ecosystem. The effect of intensification on the amount of land under cultivation is more complex because it depends on accompanying policies, factor markets, and the spatial

Dairy development provides substantial potential economic opportunities for smallholder farmers in East Africa, but productivity is constrained by the scarcity of quantity and quality feed. Ruminant livestock production is also associated with negative environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air pollution, high water consumption, land-use change, and loss of biodiversity.

The climate-smart agriculture (CSA) concept reflects an ambition to improve the integration of agriculture development and climate responsiveness. CSA aims to achieve food security and broader development goals under a changing climate and increasing food demand. CSA initiatives can sustainably increase productivity, enhance resilience, and reduce/remove greenhouse gases (GHGs), but require planning to address trade-offs and synergies between the three CSA pillars, namely: productivity, adaptation, and mitigation(1).

Small-scale fisheries account for 90% of global fishers and 40% of the global catch. Effectively managing small-scale fisheries is, therefore, crucial to progressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Co-management and community-based fisheries management are widely considered the most appropriate forms of governance for many small-scale fisheries. We outlined relationships between small-scale fisheries co-management and attainment of the SDGs, including evidence for impacts and gaps in dominant logic.

This is a report on a packaging exercise for the Tanzania land use planning innovation. It covers the evaluation process for Tanzania's readiness and use of innovative land use planning. The reports include identifying and selecting key solutions and activities necessary to scale the innovation and key actions needed to enhance the readiness and use of these key activities.

To achieve equitable sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI), it is essential to understand differential access and control over agricultural resources by women and youth, and to assess how intensification interacts with gendered and age-dependent relationships. Existing packages for assessing women’s empowerment in agriculture tend to be large-scale surveys that do not provide timely results, nor are they easily integrated into a gender-transformative process.

Recent advances in approaches to quantitative strategic foresight have enabled new insights into understanding potential futures of the agriculture sector. Quantitative foresight approaches facilitate understanding of different plausible scenarios, especially as related to both endogenous and exogenous factors (e.g., global markets and climate change). These approaches tend to be macroeconomic in nature and resolve trends relative to coarse-grained drivers.

The digital ecosystem and its actors have increasing influence over how food is produced, what food people buy, and the flow of information among farmers, supply chain actors, and consumers. Efforts to transform food systems towards sustainability, including climate change resilience and mitigation, similarly rely on digital resources and offer the opportunity to scale up best practices rapidly at low cost.

P4S II resulted from the merging the actions of BRAS-PAR and P4S I with the intention to use tools and
evidence/lessons learned from the Climate-Smart Villages and other development activities, with
existing and new partners through direct scientific support to decision makers (e.g., governments, civil
society, and researchers) and capacity building to help bring CSA to scale. The scientific activities will
be combined with dedicated communications activities such as photo essays, tweets, blog posts, etc. from