ClimBeR Governance 4 Resilience (Work Package 4) developed a framework to scale innovations for transformative impact. The framework has four elements: 1) Changing the narrative, 2) Deepening the analysis, 3) Strengthening the alliances, 4) The process of change: applying lessons learned. This framework is being applied to ClimBeR research on governance in Kenya, Morocco, Senegal, Guatemala and the Philippines.

Governments in sub-Saharan Africa promote the expansion of irrigation to improve food security, primarily through the adoption and use of groundwater-based smallholder private irrigation. Using the case of Ethiopia, we examine farmers’ willingness to adopt smallholder private irrigation packages in response to subsidies on pump prices, loan availability and reduction in ambiguities related to borehole drilling. The results of the research highlight that subsidizing pump prices may not be the best use of public funds to expand irrigation.

While water-energy-food (WEF) Nexus is one of the most important, and widely investigated, environmental topics of our time, previous stock taking efforts possess notable limitations, namely (i) their focus is restricted to research articles, and (ii) there is less focus on nexus permutations that begin with energy and food. This paper assembled more than 900 documents and systematically categorized them according to more than 10 key parameters (e.g. scale, methods, limitations), to characterize approaches, achieved outcomes and presence of variables likely to support on-the-ground change.

Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) is the production of plants, fish, insects or animals inside structures, such as greenhouses and buildings, in controlled conditions. In a rapidly urbanizing world, CEA can contribute to sustainable development, e.g. through reduced use of land, water and inputs. There is a need for innovation in policy, technology and business practices to scale up CEA in the Global South sustainably and equitably.

CBBP is a proven innovation that has been tested over the years through the engagement of multiple stakeholders. However, the pilots have not scaled to the extent they wished. The actors of CBBP were research institutes, extension and NGOs. To bring about impact at scale, various partners need to join hands to disseminate the innovation to a wider area and reach more

Study region: Lake Tana sub-basin of the Upper Blue Nile River Basin, Ethiopia. Study focus: Groundwater use for small-scale irrigation is increasing in the Lake Tana sub-basin. However, the abstraction amount and its impact are not well understood. In this study, a new methodological approach was utilized to estimate the irrigation water abstraction amount, which is based on groundwater level monitoring before, during, and at the end of the irrigation season (2021/2022).

There is increasing recognition of the role of Indigenous and local knowledge systems in sustainable land use and conservation practices. However, the evidence base remains fragmented, while local knowledge remains marginalised in many national biodiversity strategies and development plans. This applies to the Tonga people of Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The impact of climate change on the availability of water affects all types of land use and sectors. This complexity calls for integrated water resources management and negotiations between sectors on the most important, cost-effective, and productive allocation of water where it is a limited resource.

Sustainable water management requires evidence-based information on the current and future states of water resources. This study presents a comprehensive modelling framework that integrates the fully distributed mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM) and climate change scenarios with the Water Accounting Plus (WA+) tool to anticipate future water resource challenges and provide mitigation measures in the transboundary Volta River basin (VRB) in West Africa. The mHM model is forced with a large ensemble of climate change projection data from CORDEX-Africa.

Rangelands contribute significantly toward improving livelihoods, offering food security, trade, and tourism for pastoral communities. Numerous challenges include poor government policies, loss of indigenous knowledge, and top-down approaches toward sustainable rangeland rehabilitation that often fail to consider local development adoption and sustainability. In such situations, effective management is needed for sustainable rangeland ecosystem goods and services in a context characterized by rainfall unreliability, poor soil nutrient status, and high uncontrolled grazing.

This brief assesses the current state of migration-related policies in Ethiopia, and provides some early recommendations and policy pointers based on work carried out under the AGRUMIG project. In Ethiopia, the scale of migration and its impacts on rural and urban transformations are underestimated and probably increasing. There is a lack of a coherent national migration policy in the country, which is a potential development hindrance.