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2014 went on record as the hottest year ever measured, a telling sign that climate change is already here. The agriculture sector is predicted to take the heaviest toll, with the hardest hit being smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly in dry areas. With rising temperatures and greater stress on water resources, agricultural productivity is set to experience a substantial decline. Yet against these odds, we need to produce progressively more to feed a rapidly growing world population.
The good news is that science and technology are increasingly and unambiguously showing us ways to overcome these hurdles, through cutting-edge approaches like genomics, biotechnology, geo-informatics, climate-smart agriculture and systems modeling tools.
We are pleased to share these select scientific innovations and impacts of our agricultural research on drylands in 2014, where the challenges with scarce natural resources are even starker. Implemented on the ground with national partners, many of these 2014 activities and their outcomes directly bolstered the systems research of Dryland Systems, the global research program of CGIAR that ICARDA is leading.
