Land-use-change-induced increases in shallow groundwater levels across parts of the Sahel in recent years have coincided with expanded use of groundwater for irrigation. This study was conducted to assess the potential linkages and livelihood implications based on a field survey of nine villages building on previous hydrological studies. The results show that irrigators lack effective means of production and mostly rely on manual methods. Borehole usage is more profitable and reliable than shallower wells.

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

This study uses maize as the test crop. Maize is the key focus of most studies on crop response to micronutrients in SSA with a limited number of studies on wheat, rice, cowpea, sorghum, and soybean responses. Maize, constituting 45% of the cereal production in SSA in 2014, is the staple food crop (accounting for over 40% of the calories consumed in some countries such as Malawi and Zambia (http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data)) and the main component of food aid interventions in SSA (Leonardo et al. 2015).

Irrigation is an important mechanism to mitigate risks associated with the variability in rainfall for the smallholder subsistence farming system. This study analyzed how practicing small-scale irrigation (SSI) impacts the key livelihood assets on farm households’ human, physical, natural, financial, and social capitals in Ethiopia’s upper Awash sub-basin. The household-level survey data, collected from the 396 sample households, was used to carry out the current study. A Propensity Score Matching (PSM) analytical model was applied to match the SSI user and nonuser groups.

Semi-arid rangelands in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are an important source of food security and nutrition but are under increased anthropogenic pressure by a growing population. These rangelands are characterized by nutrient poor soils and distinct wet and dry season(s). Due to the soil and climate combination, conventional crop agriculture is rarely feasible without irrigation and mineral fertilizer amendments, which in turn are limited by prohibitively high fertilizer prices and lack of water.

• Climate change has led to increased production risks especially for smallholder farmers who often tend to be more vulnerable
• Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has several climate change hotspots and is more vulnerable to weather shocks compared to other regions.
• >363 million people affected by drought between 1980-2014 causing > US$31 billion in losses – with 19 billion in East Africa (FAO, 2015)
• Agricultural insurance is a risk management tool for extreme weather events; however, its coverage remains lowest in SSA (Hess and Hazell, 2016).

Enset is a staple crop of the southern Ethiopian highlands. Small-holder farmers cultivate enset as part of mixed subsistence farming systems, in which enset provides substantial food security services. While its cultivation is unique to this region, enset production systems take on many forms, varying with environmental and agronomic conditions, crop diversity and (co-)staples produced, the importance of enset for the household, and socio-economic and cultural differences.

Agriculture in general and ranches contribute significantly to the sustainability of poor and marginalized farmers. To meet the future requirements of an increasing population, animal productivity must be significantly increased. Animal production is increasingly influenced by a variety of external factors. This includes increasing demand for animal products and an inadequate supply of feed ingredients due to competition in natural resources and trade barriers. At the same time, there is growing concern about livestock and its health consequences.

A third of the land on the Earth is composed of grasslands, mainly used for forage. Much effort is being conducted to develop tools to estimate grassland productivity (GP) at different extents, concentrating on spatial and seasonal variability pertaining to climate change. GP is a reliable indicator of how well an ecosystem works because of its close connection to the ecological system equilibrium. The most commonly used proxies of GP in ecological studies are aboveground biomass (AGB), leaf area index (LAI), canopy storage capacity (CSC), and chlorophyll and nitrogen content.

Plant genetic resources (PGR), including collections held in national and international gene banks, provide access to a wide array of genetic diversity and are critical to genomics research, conservation efforts, and applied breeding. Yet, there is a general lack of awareness in the research community about the rules and treaties that govern the use of PGR, about access and benefit sharing obligations contained in international treaties and/or national laws, and about how best to comply with potentially applicable requirements.