Drylands occupy 40% of the earth’s land area and are home to 2.5 billion people – nearly a third of the world’s population. People in dry areas are forced to contend with severe environmental degradation and increasing climate variability, as population soars. A groundbreaking paper heralding a new integrated systems approach to agricultural research in the drylands, was published in the journal Food Security this week .

This is good news for 400 million people in the developing world who depend on dryland agriculture for their livelihoods. But what is new?

To begin with, the authors distinguish between households with a low asset base, whose livelihoods are dominated by vulnerability, and those with a stronger asset base. For the first group the priority is to reduce vulnerability and improve their resilience whereas the second group are well placed to benefit from sustainable intensification, focused on improving productivity per unit of land and water. “In reality, households are spread along a continuum from low to high resilience and productivity,” said Fergus Sinclair, Science Domain Leader at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), and one of the authors of the paper,

“But, there is a threshold of vulnerability that you have to cross before people are able to invest in increasing productivity, rather than protecting themselves from the sort of catastrophic collapses that we saw affecting close to 10 million people in the Horn of Africa in the 2011 drought.”

The paper proposes an approach to research for development that integrates action horizontally (across sectors) and vertically (across scales) all along impact pathways, from research activity, through outputs (new research findings), outcomes (how the findings are applied to change what extension, development partners and policy makers do), and impact (improved food security and nutrition, reduced poverty and enhanced environmental integrity in the drylands).

Click here for the full article