With many countries already struggling to achieve sustainable agricultural growth, the CGIAR has resolved to intensify and streamline research aimed at helping them cope with the additional burden of strong negative impacts resulting from global climate change.

In the plenary session of Centers' and Members' Day at AGM06, keynote speaker Robert Ziegler, IRRI Director General, announced that the Alliance of CGIAR Centers will strengthen its partnership with the global climate change community in developing a stronger agenda of climate change research.

"The impacts of climate change on agriculture will add significantly to the development challenges of reducing poverty and ensuring food production for a growing population," Ziegler said. "The livelihoods of billions of people in developing countries, particularly in the tropics, will be threatened, as crop yields decline because of shorter growing seasons."

The CGIAR is already generating relevant and effective technologies, including "climate ready" crops that can withstand higher temperatures, water logging and drought. It is also contributing importantly to innovations that result in better natural resource management, together with increased removal of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Adding to the urgency of the CGIAR's climate change research, a study launched recently by the International Livestock Research Institute (www.ilri.cgiar.org), with the title Mapping Climate Vulnerability and Poverty in Africa, shows that projected increases in temperature and changes in rainfall patterns will decrease growing periods by more than 20 percent in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Rural people in the continent's poorest countries - particularly Burundi, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Niger and Rwanda - will be at greatest risk, as their land become more marginal for agriculture.

Cynthia Rosenzweig addresses AGM06

Martin Perry addresses AGM06

Martin Parry and Cynthia Rosenzweig, who both serve on task groups of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stressed that the main issue is not agriculture's contribution to the emission of greenhouse gases, which is projected to decrease. "Until now, there has been an overemphasis on reducing agricultural emissions in developing countries," they told the CGIAR audience. "Food supplies and food security, and protecting agriculture from the impacts of climate change, should be the immediate concerns." They strongly encouraged the CGIAR to pursue a combination of adaptation and mitigation strategies.

"The task ahead may well prove bigger and more complex that what we faced at the outset of the Green Revolution," Ziegler said. "To feed a growing population, food production must be doubled over the next 25 years, but now poor countries must do so in harsh environments that climate change has rendered far less suitable for agriculture."

Following the plenary session, a series of parallel meetings dealt with diverse issues that are pertinent to the priorities for CGIAR research adopted under the leadership of the CGIAR Science Council. Joachim Voss, Alliance Executive Chair, noted that the new priorities seek to ensure that CGIAR science alleviates poverty, hunger, and malnutrition, while protecting the environment and expanding opportunities for poor farmers to earn higher incomes.

Below are key points on a selection of parallel sessions:

• Responding to the Avian Influenza Emergency. In the event of a human pandemic, the CGIAR has the potential to help meet such a crisis through its network of state-of-the-art laboratories and genebanks, global capacity for sharing information about disease risk and spread, and its mechanisms for donor coordination.
• High-value Crops. Ten Centers supported by the CGIAR invest more than US$14 million a year in research on fruit and vegetable crops, which are among the most important sources of micronutrients and income for poor farmers.
• Women in Agricultural Science. Despite a significant increase in the number of female scientists in agricultural research in industrialized and developing countries during recent decades, the participation of women in science and technology remains low. Currently, only one in five agricultural researchers in developing countries is female. A goal of the CGIAR Gender and Diversity Program is to make the CGIAR a premier global organization for the advancement of women in science.
• Biofuels in the developing world. Rising fuel prices, growing energy demand and concerns about greenhouse gas emissions have generated strong interest in this topic. The prospect of biofuel development has raised a number of concerns, such as the possible impacts on food security and the environment and issues of intellectual policy rights. The CGIAR is beginning to define its possible role and research agenda and develop and analyze different scenarios for biofuel development.