Background

Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE), a CGIAR research programme, is developing a growing portfolio of policy and technical solutions across ecosystems, sectors and scales. This programme connects the key natural resources of land, water and biodiversity. A functioning healthy ecosystem is fundamental for water availability and healthy soils. Capacity building is also an important component of this project.

WLE supports innovations that enhance the social and environmental sustainability of agri-food systems which results in the development of solutions that meet the needs of research users and the environment.

Water, Land and Ecosystem Flagships

Water, Land and Ecosystem has five flagships; out of these three are implemented by World Agroforestry (ICRAF). They comprise Restoring Degraded Landscapes, Rural-Urban Linkages, and Enhancing Sustainability across Agricultural Systems.

Restoring Degraded Landscapes works with governments, investors, farmers and scientists to restore agricultural lands that have been mismanaged or overexploited, and to protect all agricultural land from degradation. It also supports more than 1.5 million farming households to restore over 3 million hectares of land and sequester an estimated 4 megatons of CO₂ emissions per year.

Rural-Urban Linkages aims to increase water- and nutrient-use efficiency on 4 million hectares of urban and peri-urban lands, and improve nutrient- and water-use efficiency on 3.6 million hectares through resource recovery from food waste.

Enhancing Sustainability across Agricultural Systems (ESA) supports development decisions and investments for more sustainable agricultural landscapes by developing user-friendly approaches and tools to assess and manage scale effects of agricultural interventions on selected Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets.

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