AdaptMap: exploring goat diversity and adaptation

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Climate Security in the MENA Region

The evidence on conflicts around the world since the turn of the century points to a simple conclusion: conflicts, grievances and insecurities are increasingly being affected by changing climates, environmental degradation, food insecurity, and the struggle to control a finite pool of natural resources. This paper aims to understand the linkages between climate, conflict, agriculture, and migration in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region and offer a road map for the region while emphasizing the role of research and development. We do this by first clarifying what climate security means and how it links to risk and resilience (Introduction). We then present causal impact pathways to describe how climate exacerbates drivers of conflict and insecurity (Section 2). This is followed by an overview of indicators summarizing the state of climate security in MENA and a discussion of the limitations of such indicators (Section 3). We also identify climate security and climate peace hotspots in the region using spatial analysis (Section 4). We then present existing research for development efforts and discuss their potential to contribute to climate security by mitigating its drivers with a specific focus on gender inequality (Section 5). We offer entry points for improving climate security using sustainable finance (Section 6). This is followed by a series of case studies (Section 7 to 11) and finally Section 12 concludes by emphasizing the key findings of the paper

AdaptMap: Exploring goat diversity and adaptation

Goats are bred worldwide and present in a wide variety of production environments. Local breeds, which are well adapted to a range of agro-ecological conditions, contribute to ensuring the sustainability of livestock farming in marginal and difficult areas in both developed and developing countries. Compared to other livestock species, goats have been domesticated in a single region and subject to a limited amount of hybridization between breeds, thus they represent one of the best species for the study of genetic diversity and adaptation. The International Goat Genome Consortium (IGGC, http://www.goatgenome.org) was created in 2012 with the general goal of increasing the range of genomic tools and publicly available information for the goat. In 2013, the 50 K goat single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) panel was developed (http://www.goatgenome.org; [3]) by combining whole-genome sequencing and reduced representation libraries from eight breeds/populations from Europe and Asia through the cooperation of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (Inra) in France, Utrecht University in The Netherlands, the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (MARDI) in Malaysia, and DNA Landmarks in Canada. Several large projects took advantage of this newly-developed SNP panel to genotype many goat populations across the world with a range of objectives and hypotheses: genome-wide association analyses across a spectrum of research and production traits, germplasm characterization and diversity studies, and genetic prediction for selection in commercial populations. The AdaptMap project started as a voluntary consortium in 2014, with the aim of improving coordination among these otherwise independent projects for genotyping, resequencing and phenotyping of goat breeds. AdaptMap was promoted by the International Goat Genome Consortium (IGGC), the African Goat Improvement Network (AGIN), which is a group resulting from the USAID Feed the Future (FtF), the USDA Livestock Improvement Project, the European Union sponsored, 3SR\u2014Sustainable Solutions for Small ruminants and NEXTGEN projects