Scaling Success: Lessons from Adaptation Pilots in the Rainfed Regions of India

"Scaling Success" examines how agricultural communities are adapting to the challenges posed by climate change through the lens of India's rainfed agriculture regions. Rainfed agriculture currently occupies 58 percent of India's cultivated land and accounts for up to 40 percent of its total food production. However, these regions face potential production losses of more than $200 billion USD in rice, wheat, and maize by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. Unless action is taken soon at a large scale, farmers will see sharp decreases in revenue and yields.Rainfed regions across the globe have been an important focus for the first generation of adaptation projects, but to date, few have achieved a scale that can be truly transformational. Drawing on lessons learnt from 21 case studies of rainfed agriculture interventions, the report provides guidance on how to design, fund and support adaptation projects that can achieve scale

Knowledge priorities on climate change and water in the Upper Indus Basin: a horizon scanning exercise to identify the top 100 research questions in social and natural sciences

River systems originating from the Upper Indus Basin (UIB) are dominated by runoff from snow and glacier melt and summer monsoonal rainfall. These water resources are highly stressed as huge populations of people living in this region depend on them, including for agriculture, domestic use, and energy production. Projections suggest that the UIB region will be affected by considerable (yet poorly quantified) changes to the seasonality and composition of runoff in the future, which are likely to have considerable impacts on these supplies. Given how directly and indirectly communities and ecosystems are dependent on these resources and the growing pressure on them due to ever-increasing demands, the impacts of climate change pose considerable adaptation challenges. The strong linkages between hydroclimate, cryosphere, water resources, and human activities within the UIB suggest that a multi- and inter-disciplinary research approach integrating the social and natural/environmental sciences is critical for successful adaptation to ongoing and future hydrological and climate change. Here we use a horizon scanning technique to identify the Top 100 questions related to the most pressing knowledge gaps and research priorities in social and natural sciences on climate change and water in the UIB. These questions are on the margins of current thinking and investigation and are clustered into 14 themes, covering three overarching topics of “governance, policy, and sustainable solutions”, “socioeconomic processes and livelihoods”, and “integrated Earth System processes”. Raising awareness of these cutting-edge knowledge gaps and opportunities will hopefully encourage researchers, funding bodies, practitioners, and policy makers to address them

Modalities for Scaling up Sustainable Land Management and Restoration of Degraded Land.

To tackle inter-connected global challenges of population growth and migration, climate change, biodiversity loss, and degrading land and water resources, changes in land use and management are needed at a global scale. There are hundreds of options that can improve the sustainability of land management and prevent or reverse degradation, but there are almost as many socio-cultural, institutional and policy barriers preventing their adoption at scale. To tackle this challenge, the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research's Dryland Systems Program and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification convened an expert group to consider barriers and incentives to scaling up sustainable land management (SLM) and land restoration practices, as part of the first Global Land Outlook. The group reviewed existing frameworks for scaling up relevant interventions across a range of contexts, and identified eight critical success factors: i) adaptively plan; ii) consistently fund; iii) select SLM options for scaling up based on best available evidence; iv) identify and engage with stakeholders at all scales; v) build capacity for scaling up; vi) foster institutional leadership and policy change to support scaling up; vii) achieve early tangible benefits and incentives for as many stakeholders as possible and viii) monitor, evaluate and communicate. Incentives for scaling up were identified for the private sector, farmers and their communities and policy makers. Based on these findings a new framework for scaling up is presented that analyses the contexts in which there is evidence that specific SLM interventions can be scaled up and out, so that scalable SLM options can be screened and adapted to these contexts, piloted and disseminated. This will then help countries achieve land degradation neutrality and comply with the Sustainable Development Goal 15, 'Life on Land'