CGIAR's Accreditation to UNEA: Strengthening Science for Global Environmental Policy 

CGIAR, the world’s largest agricultural research partnership, has recently been accredited as an intergovernmental organization (IGO) to the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA). This accreditation, essentially conferring observer status at UNEA, marks a significant milestone for CGIAR as a science organization. It formally positions CGIAR within the highest level of international environmental governance, granting it the right to actively participate in UNEA sessions and its subsidiary organs, including UNEA-7 this coming December.  

CGIAR’s accreditation to UNEA comes at a crucial time. Around the globe, leaders are calling for urgent action to “tackle the triple planetary crisis”, slowing climate change, reversing biodiversity loss, and eliminating pollution. With its new status, CGIAR can bring fifty years of agricultural innovation to these high-level discussions, ensuring that food, water and land systems are part of the solution.  

Official recognition by UNEA amplifies CGIAR’s voice, enabling it to share on-ground evidence and science-based recommendations directly with environment ministers and policymakers. It also opens doors for forging new alliances: for example, CGIAR’s scientists are already collaborating with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) through the CGIAR Nature-Positive Initiative to identify the best net-positive farming practices, and also with the CGIAR Environmental Health and Biodiversity Platform for global policy processes. Now, as an accredited observer, CGIAR can build on such partnerships to contribute to international resolutions and campaigns for sustainability. 

Elevating CGIAR’s Role in Global Policy Processes and Science-Policy Interfaces 

Accreditation to UNEA carries profound implications for CGIAR’s engagement in global policy processes. As an official observer in UNEA, CGIAR can support Member States and international policymakers by providing science-based recommendations in discussions on climate change, biodiversity, land degradation, and other environmental issues that underpin sustainable development. It provides a formal channel for CGIAR’s scientists and leaders to participate in UNEA meetings, contribute to working documents, and circulate scientific position papers to governments. This significantly strengthens the science-policy interface, the flow of information and dialogue between researchers and decision-makers, by ensuring that the latest research on food, land, water, and climate systems is available to inform environmental policy decisions. 

Crucially, CGIAR’s new status, which will be managed by the Multifunctional Landscapes Science program, enables it to bring the agriculture and land-use perspective into global environmental negotiations. Agriculture and food systems are both impacted by and contribute to issues like climate change and biodiversity loss. With a voice at UNEA, CGIAR can highlight how sustainable agricultural practices, agroecological approaches, and food system transformations are integral to solving environmental crises. Policy coherence across sectors will be a major focus: CGIAR will be better positioned to help align agricultural development goals with environmental targets, ensuring that solutions for food security also support climate mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and land restoration. 

Advancing the Objectives of the Rio Conventions 

Recently, the international community has been striving to meet the objectives of the three “Rio Conventions”, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on climate, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) on biodiversity, and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) on land and drought. These treaties, born from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, share interlinked goals of combating climate change, halting biodiversity loss, and reversing land degradation.  With UNEA accreditation, CGIAR is better positioned to participate in intergovernmental discussions and share research insights that inform policy under the three Rio Conventions 

Through UNEA, CGIAR can further increase its direct contributions to global climate policy discussions under the UNFCCC, for example, by sharing research on climate-resilient crops, climate-smart agriculture, and low-emissions farming that can inform countries’ climate action plans. Similarly, CGIAR’s voice in UNEA will amplify its contributions to the CBD’s work on biodiversity; CGIAR’s extensive research on agrobiodiversity, ecosystem services, and nature-positive farming can help shape strategies to meet global biodiversity targets. For the UNCCD, which addresses land degradation and desertification, CGIAR’s expertise in sustainable land management and soil restoration can inform evidence-based approaches to achieve land degradation neutrality.  

Importantly, CGIAR’s presence at UNEA will help foster synergies among the three Rio Conventions. Many solutions, such as restoring degraded landscapes or implementing agroforestry, yield co-benefits for climate mitigation, biodiversity, and land health simultaneously.  

Multifunctional Landscapes Program: An Integrated Approach for Climate, Biodiversity, and Land 

One CGIAR program in particular embodies the spirit of this milestone: the CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes (MFL) Program. This systems-based program is built around a bold vision of “thriving, biodiverse, low-emissions, and healthy landscapes, managed holistically to support both people and the planet”. The MFL Program is a new research initiative that takes a comprehensive “landscape” approach to sustainably manage land, water, biodiversity, and agriculture in an integrated manner. In practice, this means the program works with communities and partners to co-create solutions that boost agricultural productivity and rural livelihoods while simultaneously restoring ecosystems, conserving biodiversity, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Programme’s vision is to reconcile production with conservation and restoration goals. This integrated approach directly supports the aims of the Rio Conventions: mitigating and adapting to climate change (through low-emission, climate-resilient agriculture), protecting biodiversity, and rehabilitating degraded lands. 

The Multifunctional Landscapes Program is specifically designed to generate scientific evidence and innovations that countries can utilize to fulfill their commitments under the UNFCCC, CBD, and UNCCD. During its inception phase, the program identified that its highest potential impact lies in the areas of environmental health and biodiversity, as well as climate adaptation and mitigation, while also contributing to poverty reduction and food security. All these efforts are pursued together under one program, reflecting the multi-benefit solutions encouraged by the Rio Conventions. 

Notably, the MFL Program emphasizes strong engagement with policy processes and stakeholders to ensure its science informs real-world decisions. The program is actively linking its research to the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the climate convention, National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) under the CBD, and Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets under the UNCCD. By aligning its work with these frameworks, CGIAR, through MFL, helps countries translate global agreements into on-the-ground action, backed by evidence and robust monitoring metrics. 

In particular, the MFL Program and its partners build on past initiatives and successes to contribute to global environmental policy through a variety of scientific outputs and collaborative platforms: 

• Evidence Generation: MFL is producing rigorous, actionable research findings on how integrated landscape approaches can yield multiple benefits. This includes synthesizing data from CGIAR’s extensive research network and applying advanced tools (like AI and **digital “twin” landscapes) to generate real-time evidence for decision-makers. Such scientifically sound evidence is crucial for policymakers to design effective strategies under the Rio Conventions, and CGIAR’s role is to ensure the evidence is available and framed to answer policy-relevant questions. For example, MFL is examining how agroecological practices can simultaneously increase climate resilience and biodiversity, providing proof of concept for nature-based solutions that climate and biodiversity policymakers can support. 

• Monitoring Frameworks and Environmental Indicators: A core focus of MFL is developing and refining impact assessment frameworks and indicators to track environmental health, biodiversity, and ecosystem services outcomes. These metrics allow countries and communities to monitor progress toward climate and biodiversity goals at the landscape scale. By contributing “impact indicators on environmental health, biodiversity, and ecosystem services” to CGIAR and global partners, the program supports the Rio Conventions’ need for better data and reporting.  

• Policy Coherence and Institutional Support: CGIAR’s MFL research actively works to inform and harmonize policies across sectors and scales. The program recognizes that achieving climate, biodiversity, and land restoration targets requires coherent policies that link agriculture, the environment, water, and rural development. To that end, MFL provides knowledge and capacity-building to help governments and institutions design coordinated policy frameworks that support effective governance. It facilitates communities of practice and learning networks that bring together stakeholders from different domains (e.g. agriculture and environment ministries) to develop a shared vision for sustainable landscapes. By supporting countries in updating their NDCs, NBSAPs, and LDN targets with integrated strategies, CGIAR is driving greater policy coherence, ensuring that climate action plans account for biodiversity and land restoration, and vice versa.  

• Living Labs and Co-creation of Solutions: A hallmark of the Multifunctional Landscapes Program is its use of “living laboratories”, place-based hubs where scientists, local communities, farmers, and policymakers co-design and test innovations in real landscapes. These living labs exemplify the science-policy interface in action: they allow for experimentation with sustainable practices (such as regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, or climate adaptation techniques) and generate evidence in a participatory manner that can inform policy. CGIAR has showcased this approach on the global stage. During the recent UN CBD COP16 in Cali, CGIAR hosted sessions with partners on Living Labs, nature-positive solutions, digital innovation for land restoration, and biodiversity. Likewise, at UNCCD’s COP16, CGIAR’s engagement included multiple side events focusing on landscape restoration and sustainable land management. By bringing examples from its living labs to these international conferences, CGIAR helps demonstrate how integrated, community-driven solutions can achieve the objectives of the Rio Conventions. The living labs approach ensures that local insights and innovations inform global policy, and that global commitments are translated back into concrete action on the ground. 

Through these contributions, from evidence generation to indicators, policy support, and on-the-ground innovation, the Multifunctional Landscapes Program demonstrates how a science-based organization can collaborate closely with governments, civil society, and international agencies to achieve shared goals for climate, biodiversity, and land restoration.  

Looking Ahead: Integrating Agricultural Science into Global Environmental Governance 

As we celebrate CGIAR’s official recognition by UNEA, we also recognize the responsibility and opportunity it carries. This accreditation isn’t an end goal; it’s the beginning of a new chapter. It formalizes CGIAR’s position as a key scientific stakeholder in multilateral environmental processes, enabling the organization to provide more direct support to UN Member States in addressing the interconnected challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. Moving forward, CGIAR will leverage this status to inject evidence-based insights into policy debates and to promote solutions that link food security with environmental sustainability. We can expect to see CGIAR scientists contributing to UNEA discussions, collaborating on international assessments, and helping design coherent policy approaches that span the agriculture-environment space. 

Author : Regina Edward -Uwadiale