The field methods employed in the soil health component of the AfSIS (Africa Soil Information Service) project are referred to as the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF). This field guide outlines field protocols for measuring indicators of the “health” of an ecosystem, including vegetation cover, structure and floristic composition, historic land use, visible signs of soil degradation, and soil physical characteristics.

Women’s land rights are increasingly advocated as an empowerment tool to spur development outcomes. However, empirical evidence of this relationship is limited. In this study we use data from peasant communities in rural Peru to explore the effect of the intra-household allocation of inherited land on women’s empowerment. Empowerment is modeled as a latent variable measured by different influence indicators using a Generalized Structural Equation approach.

The Karkheh Basin Focal Project was designed to collect and organize baseline information

for future researchers and to highlight future research needs. All collected data is available

in the IDIS system. The specific research findings and recommendations for the basin are

1) The use of non-agricultural water measures is likely to be a more effective solution to

remaining rural poverty in the Karkheh basin and Iran; 2) In the short to medium term,

agricultural water policy and research should focus on improvements in physical water

Katharine Downie, Coordinator for the Technical Consortium for Building Resilience in the Horn of Africa, ILRI, at the side event, “Measuring and Evaluating Resilience in Drylands of East Africa”. IFPRI 2020 conference on Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security, May 15-17, 2014, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. More information at http://www.2020resilience.ifpri.info

Years of concerted activism to bring awareness of climate change and its consequences to the fore of global concerns are finally yielding dividends. Until recently, most climate change activity focused on medium- to long-term projections regarding the nature and trajectory of change processes. With the uncertainties inherent in long-term climate projections and the difficulty of building political and economic momentum from hypothetical future scenarios, progress was slow.