News & Blogs
New paper discusses women’s land rights as a pathway to poverty reduction
Land is an important asset for rural households, and having secure land rights is important for poverty reduction. Despite the large body of literature on the relationship between land tenure security, livelihoods, and poverty, most of this literature is based on household-level data and does not consider possible intrahousehold inequalities in land ownership. We know […] Continue Reading
‘Spongy’ Soil Can Help Farmers Combat Climate Change
Droughts are expected to worsen and intense storms to become more frequent across much of the country in coming decades as the planet warms, but their impact on agriculture could be blunted if American farmers focus on their roots. A new study, released Wednesday, examines the benefits of cover cropping—planting soil-enriching plants between crop cycles—and other […] Continue Reading
Will Africa’s Great Green Wall discourage migration to Europe?
The Great Green Wall is more of a metaphor than an actual wall. It was initially conceived as a physical barrier of trees on the edge of the desert, but over the past few years, it has evolved into a hodge-podge of projects that attempt to restore degraded land and combat desertification. Thanks in part […] Continue Reading
Youth involvement in agribusiness: Examples from Africa
According to the 2017 World Food Prize laureate, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, the ”future of African youth lies in agriculture.” This future can be realized through making agriculture both profitable and “cool” for young people. Adesina also argues for the need to move the perception of agriculture from a way of life for millions of rural people to […] Continue Reading
Scientists Use Google Earth and Crowdsourcing to Map Uncharted Forests
No single person could ever hope to count the world’s trees. But a crowd of them just counted the world’s drylands forests—and, in the process, charted forests never before mapped, cumulatively adding up to an area equivalent in size to the Amazon rainforest. Current technology enables computers to automatically detect forest area through satellite data in […] Continue Reading
A picture paints a thousand words for Smart Tree-Invest project
The Climate-smart, Tree-based Co-investment in Adaptation and Mitigation in Asia (Smart Tree-Invest) project focused on improving the livelihoods and resilience of smallholder farmers through the promotion of climate-smart, tree-based agriculture in three countries by reducing their vulnerability to climate change. The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) project, supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry […] Continue Reading