Dr. Todd Rosenstock is the Director of CGIAR Climate Action, where he leads a cross-institutional partnership to align science, innovation, and action to transform agrifood, land, and water systems in the face of climate change. His leadership focuses on turning evidence into impact—building teams, partnerships, and systems that generate demand-driven research and ensure science translates into decisions benefiting producers, investors, and policy processes.
Before his appointment, he was a Principal Scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, where he led efforts on adaptation tracking, data science for investment and policymaking, and mitigation in crops, livestock, and agroforestry. Throughout his career, Dr. Rosenstock has been deeply interested in monitoring social and environmental change—how data, observation, and learning can accelerate climate action. For example, he designed and directed major initiatives such as Adaptation Insights, which enhances the availability, quality, and use of adaptation data across Africa, and the Africa Agriculture Adaptation Atlas, which helps countries and funders identify climate risks and prioritize adaptation in agriculture.
Earlier in his career, he spent nearly a decade with World Agroforestry (ICRAF), based in Nairobi and Kinshasa, investigating how smallholder farming systems affect and are affected by environmental change. He also contributed to CGIAR’s Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) Program, where he led efforts to scale up agriculture that drives productive, resilient, and low-emission food systems and helped shape the program’s mitigation-specific portfolio.
Dr. Rosenstock brings broad expertise in both adaptation and mitigation research, with more than 15 years of experience across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He combines scientific excellence—exemplified by his contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on mitigation in agriculture and land use—with a commitment to delivery, advancing systems that translate research into measurable outcomes. He holds a PhD in Ecology and an MSc in International Agricultural Development from the University of California, Davis.