Tackling gender inequalities is becoming increasingly important for voluntary sustainability systems to address. More and more, sustainability systems are looking to integrate gender into their standards and the management of their organisations. Sustainability systems that are not gender-responsive can result in unnecessary health and safety risks for women and girls, and lead to unequal impacts and unintended consequences.

Ethiopia's highland mixed crop-livestock farming system is one of the country's primary agricultural systems, where crop and livestock production is integrated. However, Ethiopia's mixed farming system, which is dominated by resource-poor smallholder farmers, is frequently confronted with feed shortages and land degradation in the form of soil erosion and nutrient depletion, resulting in low agricultural production. Assuring sustainable agricultural output (both from crop and livestock sub-sector) in the mixed crop-livestock system is becoming a key challenge.

The cascading effects of biodiversity decline on human well-being present a pressing challenge for sustainable development. Conservation efforts often prioritize safeguarding specific species, habitats, or intact ecosystems but overlook biodiversity’s fundamental role in providing Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP) in human-modified landscapes.

Plant diversity has long been linked to an increase in ecosystem productivity and function, but concrete examples in which ecosystem services are linked to diversity at the scale at which management decisions are taken are rare. We specifically tested for a correlation between plant diversity and provisioning ecosystem services estimated via the potential to produce meat and wool. We also tested whether higher levels of plant diversity conferred higher levels of ecosystem resistance to global change drivers, measured as the ability to sustain productivity across time.

Work package 4 maps rice areas using remote sensing, geographic information system (GIS), and crop modeling. This work builds on the Remote sensingbased Information and Insurance for Crops in Emerging economies (RIICE, http://www.riice.org/) co-developed by IRRI and implemented in South and Southeast Asian countries. RIICE technology is being introduced across Africa to enhance its rice monitoring system. A set of field protocols and forms was developed for seasonal field data collection.

Work package 4 maps rice areas using remote sensing, geographic information system (GIS), and crop modeling. This work builds on the Remote sensing-based Information and Insurance for Crops in Emerging economies (RIICE, http://www.riice.org/) co-developed by IRRI and implemented in South and Southeast Asian countries. RIICE technology is being introduced across Africa to enhance its rice monitoring system. A set of field protocols and forms was developed for seasonal field data collection.

The new Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) is a streamlined tool for measuring women’s empowerment, intended for use in large-scale, multitopic surveys conducted by national statistical systems. WEMNS is designed to measure empowerment in households with all types of livelihoods, in both urban and rural areas, complementing the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), which focuses on agricultural households.

This report describes the process carried out for the development of a component in the e-Agrology mobile application, which allows the farmer to accept informed consent, thus authorizing the sharing of data on their agricultural production.

On 7 February 2024 at the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis, CGIAR Centers – Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, ICARDA, IWMI, IFPRI, and supported by the CGIAR Accelerate for Impact Platform (A4IP) – in collaboration with the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology of Egypt (ASRT) and under the auspices of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research of Egypt (MOHESR) hosted the "Consultation Workshop: Deep Diving into the Agri-tech Innovation Ecosystem in Egypt".

Lack of systematic tools and approaches for measuring climate change adaptation limits the measurement of progress toward the adaptation goals of the Paris Agreement. To this end, we piloted a new approach, the Biomass Climate Adaptation Index (Biomass CAI), for measuring agricultural adaptation progress in Ethiopia across multiple scales using satellite remote sensing data. The Biomass CAI can monitor agri-biomass productivity associated with adaptation interventions remotely and facilitate more tailored precision adaptation.