Project Description
This project aimed to contribute to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) led SOLAW21 report by providing a strong comprehensive response framework for better understanding the effectiveness of technical, Institutional and policy responses to mitigate and adapt to land, soil and water degradation.
The scale of benefits of this project will be global as well as regional. The vision of the success of this project is that the comprehensive framework of response assessment (CFRA) directly contributes to FAO led SOLAW21 report and plays a significant role in the international discourse on the state of land and water for agriculture with the framework being used to highlight the effectiveness of potential responses. The CFRA will provide valuable information on related opportunities and challenges to support an informed decision-making process at different levels of governance and decision making from multilateral organisations to national and state governments. There are six chapters of the SOLOW21 report and many of the chapters focus on responses. This project is envisioned to provide a framework for these chapters in understanding response effectiveness.
It is anticipated that in the future the CFRA will be utilised by countries in designing and assessing the potential of interventions and responses to the degradation of land and water resources. Future work could relate to the testing of CFRA at different scales across contrasting landscapes with the application of local-level data on responses, downscaled climate models, and regional level climate change scenarios. This could be intended for a few selected countries in Asia which will be of common interest to ACIAR and FAO.
Project Personnel and Beneficiaries
The Technical offices from FAO Rome, and regional offices and country offices in Asia Pacific, Africa, Near East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean Island helped with the expert opinion survey.
WOCAT, the global network on Sustainable Land Management (SLM) that promotes the documentation, sharing and use of knowledge to support adaptation, innovation and decision-making in SLM helped with the data on the impacts of SLMs.
Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research supported with funding guidance.
Outcomes to Date
1. CFRA will be a core element of the future SOLAW reports of FAO.
2. The Philippines government will standardize the assessment and sustainable management of land, water, and soils in the country based on CFRA.
https://www.philstar.com/business/2022/08/28/2205576/government-standardize-management-land-water
The project demonstrates the fruitfulness of partnership building and underlined the need of local and global partners working together to optimise approaches and scale them for impact. Such a partnership approach offers the opportunity to build trust and intentionally create a vision of solutions and listen to the perspective of different stakeholders. It addresses SDG 17 among other SDGs (2,6,13,15) as partnership is key to join forces and enhance synergies across sectors and stakeholders and for setting investment priorities.
Project Significance
Sustainable management of land, soil, and water is important to tackle the growing dual challenges of global food insecurity and environmental degradation. Different regions and countries face these challenges differently, some are more vulnerable than others. Various solutions and response strategies have been developed at a national, regional, and global level to sustainably manage these land, soil, and water. However, the institutional, technical, social, and financial capacities of different regions and countries are different, making it hard to find a set of solutions that would be effective in diverse conditions. There is no comprehensive assessment framework that could be used to test and examine different solution strategies. The project contributes to this gap.
This project was designed to develop a Comprehensive Framework of Response Assessment (CFRA) for sustainable management of agricultural systems (land, soil, and water) that could be applied to assess different solutions at national, sub-national, and local levels. The main features of the CFRA are its ability for assessing the relative costs, benefits, and effectiveness of different responses; and in identifying the priority and sequence of responses for investment decisions, and in scaling up effective responses. The developed framework and associated analysis contributed to FAO’s State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture (SOLAW) 2021 (SOLAW2021).
The steps undertaken in the project are as follows: 1) Develop a theoretical basis based on a DPSIR framework based on existing literature and expert consultations; 2) Extensive consultations with FAO to understand the effectiveness of responses to various challenges at regional levels; 3) development and augmentation of a global repository of response; 4) comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of different solutions to test the effectiveness of the CFRA.
Related Link
External link to https://www.aciar.gov.au/media-search/blogs/beta-testing-global-roll-out