A project to bring together ecosystem services, agricultural productivity, and smallholder livelihoods in landscape planning has been awarded an Innovation Fund grant from the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE). The project is will be implemented in Peru, Kenya and Tanzania, it says on the WLE website. It is co-led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
According to WLE, the team seeks to integrate stakeholder perspectives into a new planning framework and “investment optimization tool” in order to reconcile development and ecosystem services objectives. Partners include: The Nature Conservancy, Natural Capital Project, Nairobi Water Fund, and Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania.
Two other projects have also been awarded grants from WLE’s Innovation Fund which was only launched in 2014. The first one is led by Biodiversity International and targets agricultural innovation and ecosystem service management in the Northern Volta. The second one is again led by IFPRI and will investigate a generic Agent Based Modeling framework for complex ecosystem service analyses in WLE focal regions.
WLE’s Innovation Fund aims at supporting impact-driven research that features its ecosystems-based approach. The Fund encourages integrated, innovative research, cross-regional and global development and use of tools, methods and analysis that support equitable ecosystems-based development and investments.
