A new strategy for a new era

The 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy situates CGIAR in the evolving global context, which demands a systems transformation approach for food, land, and water systems. Covering all research for development programming across CGIAR, it provides an overview of how CGIAR will develop and deploy its capacities, assets, and skills to address priority global and regional challenges with partners over the decade. And importantly, it builds on CGIAR’s track record of collaborating with partners to deliver impacts for more than 50 years, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of hunger and poverty and supporting low-income producers and consumers.

Download the CGIAR 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy here.

One CGIAR

One CGIAR provides an opportunity for a fresh strategy to shape a stronger, more relevant science agenda for today’s dynamic world. One CGIAR is the integration of CGIAR’s capabilities, knowledge, assets, people, and global presence for a new era of interconnected and partnership-driven research towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One CGIAR enables us to operate as a cohesive organization with a single mission, seamlessly leveraging all of our capabilities and assets to deliver real benefits to people and our planet. Through integrated systems research, One CGIAR and country partners are striving for impact to create sustainable and resilient food, land, and water systems, and meet SDG targets.

CGIAR’s vision and mission

Vision

A world with sustainable and resilient food, land, and water systems that deliver diverse, healthy, safe, sufficient, and affordable diets, and ensure improved livelihoods and greater social equality, within planetary and regional environmental boundaries.

Mission

To deliver science and innovation that advance the transformation of food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis.

What we will deliver

 

CGIAR is targeting multiple SDG benefits across five Impact Areas. Working with others, for each of the Impact Areas CGIAR contributes to collective global targets for the transformation of food, land, and water systems across local, regional, and global levels. In each Action Area, designated Platforms will foster critical thinking and use of evidence to improve their focus on the scaling of innovation and impact from research.

2030 Global Collective Targets for Five Impact Areas

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Nutrition, health and food security

End hunger for all and enable affordable healthy diets for the 3 billion people who do not currently have access to safe and nutritious food.
Reduce cases of foodborne illness (600 million annually) and zoonotic disease (1 billion annually) by one third.

Poverty reduction, livelihoods and jobs

Lift at least 500 million people living in rural areas above the extreme poverty line of US $1.90 per day (2011 PPP).
Reduce by at least half the proportion of men, women, and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions.

Gender equality, youth and inclusion

Close the gender gap in rights to economic resources, access to ownership, and control over land and natural resources for over 500 million women who work in food, land, and water systems.
Offer rewarding opportunities to 267 million young people who are not in employment, education, or training.

Climate adaptation and mitigation

Implement all National Adaptation Plans and Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement.
Equip 500 million small-scale producers to be more resilient to climate shocks, with climate adaptation solutions available through national innovation systems.
Turn agriculture and forest systems into a net sink for carbon by 2050, with emissions from agriculture decreasing by 1 Gt per year by 2030 and reaching a floor of 5 Gt per year by 2050.

Environmental health and biodiversity

Stay within planetary and regional environmental boundaries: consumptive water use in food production of less than 2500 km3 per year (with a focus on the most stressed basins), zero net deforestation, nitrogen application of 90 Tg per year (with redistribution towards low-input farming systems) and increased use efficiency, and phosphorus application of 10 Tg per year.
Maintain the genetic diversity of seeds, cultivated plants, and farmed and domesticated animals and their related wild species, including through soundly managed genebanks at the national, regional, and international levels.

 

CGIAR measures its effective contributions from research to impact along three main pathways within innovation systems:

  1. Science-based innovation: This is a co-development of sets of knowledge products, technologies, services, and other solutions along a scaling pathway.
  2. Targeted capacity development: This includes working with individuals, firms, and organizations — designed to improve the utility and use of technological and institutional solutions.
  3. Advice on policy: This pathway includes business strategies, institutional arrangements, and investment programs, together with more formal public policy sector instruments.

 

CGIAR works in six regions: Central and West Asia and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, East and Southern Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Pacific.

 

CGIAR strives for global and regional impact by organizing its work along three Action Areas in which accelerated innovation is required to create sustainable and resilient food, land, and water systems and to meet SDG targets. The three Action Areas, which build on the firm foundation of CGIAR’s traditional strengths in genetics and farming systems with a more ambitious agenda around food, land, and water systems, are:

  1. Systems Transformation
  2. Resilient Agrifood Systems
  3. Genetic Innovation

Learn more about our priorities for research and innovation in each Action Area.

 

The 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy sets the stage for doing business differently to ensure that research provides real solutions for development. CGIAR is changing the way it works, following seven new implementation approaches:

  1. Embracing a systems transformation approach, seeking multiple benefits across five SDG-linked Impact Areas
  2. Leveraging ambitious partnerships for change in which CGIAR is strategically positioned
  3. Positioning regions, countries, and landscapes as central dimensions of partnership, worldview, and impact
  4. Generating scientific evidence on multiple transformation pathways
  5. Targeting risk-management and resilience as critical qualities for food, land, and water systems
  6. Harnessing innovative finance to leverage and deliver research through new investment and funding models
  7. Making the digital revolution central to our way of working

 

Current Performance and Results Management System

CGIAR’s current Performance and Results Management System delivers responsible stewardship and assurance for funders, providing timely and robust evidence of CGIAR’s value, return on investment and delivery against expectations. It also provides the basis for learning and adaptive management through strengthened use of theory of change, projected benefits and stage-gates.

A new, collaboratively designed CGIAR Performance and Results Management Framework 2022–2030 has been developed, providing a streamlined CGIAR results architecture aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals.

CGIAR 2022–24 Investment Prospectus 

The CGIAR 2022–24 Investment Prospectus provides a body of research and innovation — a portfolio of CGIAR Research Initiatives — to deliver on the priorities set out in the CGIAR 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy 

The Research Initiatives are prioritized areas of investment that bring capacity from within and beyond CGIAR to bear on well-defined, major challenges. They are organized by the three Action Areas presented in the CGIAR 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy and are designed to contribute to all five Impact Areas. 

To learn more about CGIAR Research Initiatives, visit our Portfolio by clicking below.

 

Discover CGIAR's Research Portfolio

 

Header image: A rice paddy landscape in the Ninh Bình province of Vietnam. Photo by Jacquelyn Turner/CCAFS