Enabling Africa to feed Africa will be the major theme of this year’s AASW—but this requires much more than just a Green Revolution. Achieving food self-sufficiency is complex and multi-faceted. A number of opportunities and challenges have been i…


Enabling Africa to feed Africa will be the major theme of this year’s AASW—but this requires much more than just a Green Revolution. Achieving food self-sufficiency is complex and multi-faceted. A number of opportunities and challenges have been i…

Over the past ten years, the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) has used engagement platforms across a wide range of scales to address an equally wide range of challenges. We recently prepared a brief note on CPWF experiences for Africa …
Over the past five years, the idea of sustainable intensification – of producing more food from the same area of land while reducing the environmental impacts – has been gaining traction in policy debate. But not only is there a strong scientific r…
Is a small footprint really better than a large one? In light of World Day to Combat Desertification, Dennis Wichelns discusses the usefulness (or lack thereof) of using water footprints to mitigate water scarcity issues. Water footprints measure the a…

Metals, excess nutrients, and sediment are processed and filtered out as water moves through forests, wetlands, natural grasslands and riparian zones. It is usually easier to prevent pollution harnessing the forces of nature than to clean up the mess w…