Given the persistent poor livelihood of cocoa-farming households, future climate predictions and the worldwide demand pressure for higher cocoa quality and productivity, there is still a strong need to find new approaches that guarantee a sustainable cocoa future in cocoa-producing countries amongst which Cameroon is one of them. This exploratory research investigates potential future pathways for the cocoa sector in Cameroon by mapping the perceptions of actors involved in the socio-technical regime.

This note proposes a roadmap to advise public and private investors, banks, corporates, and NGOs, on how to mainstream gender smart investing to scale climate-smart agriculture (CSA).

Livestock are critical for incomes, livelihoods, nutrition and ecosystems management throughout the global South. Livestock production and the consumption of livestock-based foods such as meat, cheese, and milk is, however, under global scrutiny for its contribution to global warming, deforestation, biodiversity loss, water use, pollution, and land/soil degradation. This paper argues that, although the environmental footprint of livestock production presents a real threat to planetary sustainability, also in the global south, this is highly contextual.

CONTEXT: The Greater Mekong Subregion has been undergoing rapid agricultural transformation over the last
decades, as traditional diverse subsistence-oriented agriculture is evolving towards intensified commercial
production systems. Negative environmental impacts often include deforestation, nutrient pollution, and
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore the potential of crop-livestock integration to mitigate trade-offs between

The aim of this guideline is to provide a methodological approach for an integrated aquaculture performance assessment. It was developed as a deliverable of the Scaling Systems and Partnerships for Accelerating the Adoption of Improved Tilapia Strains by Small-Scale Fish Farmers (SPAITS) project. One of the main outputs of the project is to conduct an integrated performance assessment of improved tilapia strains in participating small-scale fish farming households in Myanmar. The integrated assessment comprises three domains: economic, social and environmental.

Cocoa and oil palm are the major commodity crops produced in Ghana and livelihood options for hundreds of thousands of rural households. However, their production has negative environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Certification standards have been promoted as a market-led mechanism to ensure their sustainable production. Even though food security does not feature in the theory of change of most certification standards, there are interesting intersections. This paper assesses the food security outcomes of certification adoption among cocoa and oil palm smallholders in Ghana.

The global food system is causing large‐scale environmental degradation and is a major contributor to climate change. Its low diversity and failure to produce enough fruits and vegetables is contributing to a global health crisis. The extraordinary diversity of tropical tree species is increasingly recognized to be vital to planetary health and especially important for supporting climate change mitigation. However, they are poorly integrated into food systems.

The achievement of several sustainable development goals and the Paris Climate Agreement depends on rapid progress towards sustainable food and land systems in all countries. We have built a flexible, collaborative modeling framework to foster the development of national pathways by local research teams and their integration up to global scale. Local researchers independently customize national models to explore mid-century pathways of the food and land use system transformation in collaboration with stakeholders.

This practitioner’s guide explains how to promote gender-responsive forest tenure reform in community-based forest regimes. It is aimed at those taking up this challenge in developing countries. There is no one single approach to reforming forest tenure practices for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. Rather, it involves taking advantage of opportunities that emerge in various institutional arenas such as policy and law-making and implementation, government administration, customary or community-based tenure governance, or forest restoration at the landscape scale.

Providing credible and quantifiable measures of the impact of CGIAR innovations at scale has always been a challenge. Recent SPIA-supported research has attempted to address this challenge using quasi-experimental approaches to assessing impact. This technical note details some of these completed and ongoing studies and approaches, focusing on the identification strategies used to infer causal impact, and the kinds of diverse data sets that may be brought to bear in making these inferences.

Small-scale irrigation (SSI) provides great benefits to farmers in terms of increased yields and profits, better food and nutrition security and greater resilience to climate shocks. Ethiopia has high potential for expanding SSI and has invested considerably in this area in recent years. Despite these investments, several challenges to further expansion of irrigation technologies remain. Different stakeholders in the country play important roles in overcoming these barriers to further scale technologies for SSI.

Achieving gender equality in irrigation can result in greater production, income, and job opportunities for both men and women smallholder farmers from diverse social groups, while building climate resilience in sub-Saharan Africa. In Ethiopia, national irrigation agencies, donors, and researchers have been assisting project implementers to mainstream gender issues into the planning and implementation of irrigation programs.