In order to safeguard countries from quarantine risks (insect pests, pathogens, nematodes, parasitic weeds) associated with the movement of legume (faba bean, lentil, chickpea, grasspea) and cereal (wheat and barley) germplasm, ICARDA’s Germplasm Health Unit (GHU) follows a regulatory and quarantine program implemented in close collaboration with competent institutions where ICARDA has platforms for crop breeding, germplasm multiplication and evaluation and genetic resources exchange.

Abiotic factors play an important role in most ecological and crop systems that depend on
certain levels of temperature, light and precipitation to initiate important physiological events
(Schulze et al., 2019). Understanding how these factors drive the physiological processes is
a key approach to provide recommendations for adaptation and biodiversity conservation in
applied ecology studies. The package climatrends aims to provide the methods in R (R Core
Team, 2020) to compute precipitation and temperature indices that serve as input for climate

The current paradigm of biodiversity conservation, with its continued focus on the notion of pristine nature, has resulted in the separation of humans and nature at the expense of both biological and cultural–linguistic diversity. The continued annexation of land for the cause of conservation has resulted in the curtailment of both rights and access to local and diverse food sources for many rural communities.

To leverage agriculture's potential to better benefit both people and nature, policymakers need clear messages about which farming practices positively impact biodiversity and yields, and when trade-offs arise. Existing reviews analyse effects of different agricultural practices on either biodiversity or yield, without considering interactions.

Meet district participatory land use team member, Patrick – also known as the peacemaker – who helps communities implement CGIAR’s Joint Village Land Use Planning process. Learn how the process can help pastoral and farming communities mutually agree on how to use shared land so that everyone can manage and conserve resources peacefully, to achieve livelihood, biodiversity and environment outcomes. Created by and for the International Livestock Research Institute and the CGIAR initiative on Livestock and Climate.

This chapter by Yuliani et al. begins with a brief description of the Adaptive Collaborative Management process that occurred in the early 2000s in the village of Baru Pelepat in Jambi province, Indonesia – a process facilitated by these authors. After a brief introduction to the community itself, Yuliani et al. launch into a description of the bottom-up process that resulted in local communities getting legal rights to manage a special forest area near their community, an area that had been part of Indonesia’s forest estate.

Establishing protected areas creates an opportunity to reduce deforestation. This study aims to inform the Congolese government’s efforts to promote forest and biodiversity conservation by assessing the effectiveness of the Yangambi Biosphere Reserve (YBR) in reducing deforestation. Group and individual interviews designed to understand the causes of pressure on forest cover in the Yangambi landscape complemented satellite imagery analyses. The results indicate that deforestation inside the YBR is not significantly different from outside the YBR.

In the tropics, combining food security with biodiversity conservation remains a major challenge. Tropical agroforestry systems are among the most biodiversity friendly and productive land-use systems, and 70% of cocoa is grown by >6 million smallholder farmers living on <2$ per day. In cacao’s main centre of diversification, the western Amazon region, interest is growing to achieve premium prices with the conversion of high-yielding, but mostly bulk-quality cacao to native fine-flavor cacao varieties, culturally important since pre-Columbian times.

Ricinodendron heudelotii (Baill.) Heckel is an important nutraceutical reservoir. Its Sustainable exploitation requires information on its potential distribution in the current context of rapid population growth and climate change threats. This study aimed to map the suitable areas for its domestication and conservation under current and future climate conditions in Benin. Occurrence data were recorded and combined with the environmental layers of two climatic scenarios (optimistic RCP 4.5 and pessimistic RCP 8.5) following the biodiversity modelling approach (biomod2).

In late 2021, a range of experts from around the world came together through GEOBON and the bioDiscovery program of Future Earth to provide expert input to the Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework (GBF)—the new strategic framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that will guide interventions to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services for the next 3 decades.

Humanity is challenged with making progress toward global biodiversity, freshwater, and climate goals, while providing food and nutritional security for everyone. Our current food and land-use systems are incompatible with this ambition making them unsustainable. Papers in this special feature introduce a participatory, integrated modeling approach applied to provide insights on how to transform food and land-use systems to sustainable trajectories in 12 countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Finland, India, Mexico, Rwanda, Sweden, the UK, and USA.