Improving agricultural water management through innovative technical and policy approaches. The Water Program (formerly the Water and Climate Program) addresses the challenge of efficient, sustainable water use to support agricultural production in a context of increasingly uncertain climate, competition from other sectors and declining water quality. The program works to improve agricultural water management through innovative technical and policy approaches under three main themes:
Improving livelihoods from productive aquatic farming systems and sustainable fisheries The Fisheries Program brokers research partnerships to improve food security and fishers’ livelihoods through productive aquatic farming systems and sustainable wild-catch fisheries. It aims to improve human health and wellbeing by making food systems and policies more nutrition-sensitive.
In September 2020, ACIAR initiated a new research program—Climate Change—to focus on an issue that represents an acute threat to global food security and successful poverty eradication. ACIAR already has supported and brokered research that aims to build adaptive capacity and reduce vulnerability of smallholder agricultural systems to climate change.
Addressing the prospect that fisheries in the Pacific region may collapse is the focus of a new ACIAR-supported project
This project aims to create greater policy awareness of the future issues and a greater collaboration between policy and research on using new approaches to support transformation of food systems. This project builds upon two earlier projects. The first one, completed in March 2020, mapped the food systems in the EGP and explored the major trends, drivers of change, and uncertainties in the system in a series of 9 Status Reports for the Bangladesh, India and Nepal with a focus on the EGP region.
ACIAR is undertaking a three-stage assessment initiative to understand and better respond to COVID-19.
This project aimed to improve soil and irrigation water management in Laos and Cambodia to achieve sustainably improved vegetable yields and household economies. View project page.
Assessing impacts and progress against development objectives means evaluating much more than agricultural yields or gross margins per hectare. We need new approaches that are fit for purpose to evaluate the multiple and complex benefit streams that modern agricultural research for development seeks to catalyse.
