Project funded by the CGIAR Water, Land and Ecosystems research program to focus in 2021 on reflecting and critically thinking how our research across CGIAR centers can better help landscapes to become sustainable and resilient while addressing the interlinked global challenges, including:
- Ending poverty,
- Reversing land degradation
- Achieving water, food and nutritional security
- Halting biodiversity loss
The project two main objectives are:
Collect and integrate our shared experience across CGIAR centers:
Synthesize the challenges and enabling conditions for successfully implementing and delivering a multifunctional landscape approaches.
Capacity building and creating a safe space for discussion and reflection:
Disseminate and built capacity across CGIAR researchers for implementing, monitoring and funding landscape approaches through multiple mechanisms including webinars, podcasts and blogs.
Learn more about the team!
Natalia Estrada-Carmona
Project leader
Co-leader of the Enhancing Sustainability Across Agricultural Systems flagship – WLE
Dr. Natalia Estrada-Carmona is an Associate Scientist with The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Her research focuses on estimating agrobiodiversity’s contribution to multifunctional and sustainable farms and landscapes. She believes that agriculture can play a pivotal role in achieving sustainability goals, but this potential can be untapped only through multidisciplinary and systems research. Natalia has contributed to projects in Latin America and the Caribbean (Costa Rica, Cuba, and Colombia), Africa (Zambia and Burkina Faso), and Asia (Viet Nam). She has a Ph.D. in natural resources management from the University of Idaho, US, and CATIE and holds a MSc in environmental socioeconomic from CATIE, Costa Rica.
Marcela Quintero
Co-leader of the Restoring Degraded Landscapes flagship – WLE
Marcela Quintero is Agroecosystems and Sustainable Landscapes Research Area Director for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Marcella is the Co-leader of WLE’s Restoring Degraded Landscapes flagship research program.
Leigh Ann Winowiecki
Co-leader of the Restoring Degraded Landscapes flagship – WLE
Dr. Leigh Ann Winowiecki is a Soil Systems Scientist at World Agroforestry (ICRAF) based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her research focuses on soil carbon dynamics, rangeland health, land restoration, and the integration of social and ecological dimensions of ecosystem health. Since 2009 she has co-developed and implemented ICRAF’s Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) in over 40 countries with a myriad of partners, including NGOs, district, and national governments, as well as international organizations. The framework is a systematic methodology to assess soil and land health, track changes overtime, and monitor restoration.
Roseline Remans
Co-leader of the Enhancing Sustainability Across Agricultural Systems flagship – WLE
Dr. Ir. Roseline Remans is a Senior Scientist with Bioversity International and Adjunct Scientist with Ghent University. She is coordinating WLE’s research flagship, Enhancing Sustainability across Agricultural Systems (ESA). Her research focuses on enhancing management of biodiversity in food systems for healthier diets, better livelihoods and environmental sustainability. Her approach is highly cross-sectoral and has contributed to in-field applications, policies as well as high-impact publications, including in Nature, Science, PNAS, among others. Remans previously worked as a Marie Curie & Earth Institute fellow and associate research scientist at Columbia University based in New York (2008-2013) and Addis Ababa (2013 -2016). She has a PhD in Biosystems engineering from KULeuven in Belgium with work in Cuba, Mexico and Colombia. Remans is the co-principal investigator for the Agrobioversity Index, co-lead of the Consortium for Improving Agricultural Livelihoods in Central Africa (CIALCA), and contributor to the CGIAR – Wageningen University Food systems for healthier diets flagship of the Agriculture for Nutrition and Health CRP.
Matthew McCartney
Co-leader of the Variability, Risk, and Competing Uses flagship – WLE
Matthew McCartney co-leads the WLE Research Theme on Variability, Risk, and Competing Uses and is Research Group Leader for Sustainable Infrastructure and Ecosystems at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). He specializes in water resources, wetland and hydro-ecological studies.
Claudia Ringler
Co-leader of the Variability, Risk, and Competing Uses flagship – WLE
Claudia Ringler was appointed deputy division director of the Environment and Production Technology Division at IFPRI in 2011. Claudia manages IFPRI’s Water Research group and since 2015 is also the Natural Resource Management Theme Lead. From 1996 until her current appointment, she served in various other research positions in that division.
Thomas Falk
Representing the Land and Water Solutions for Sustainable Agriculture flagship – WLE
Institutional Economist by specialization, Dr. Thomas Falk has done extensive research in the field of governance in agricultural systems in developing countries. Since 2015, he contributes in the International Crops Research Centre for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) to the assessment of sustainable agricultural system transformations, the assessment of ecosystem services and related governance implications, as well as the development of scalable tools to trigger sustainable behavioral change. He has substantial expertise in the fields of economics of natural resource management; multi-level governance in social-ecological systems (SES); science-policy interaction and trans-disciplinarity; economic institutions and institutional change in natural resource management.
Pay Drechsel
Co-leader of theRural-Urban Linkages flagship – WLE
Pay Drechsel has more than 25 years of experience working as an environmental scientist in projects aiming at the safe recovery of resources from human waste, integrated natural resources management and sustainable agricultural production in developing countries. He is strategic program leader of Rural-Urban Linkages at IWMI.
Ruth Meinzen-Dick
Ruth Meinzen-Dick is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), based in Washington DC, and Coordinator of the CGIAR Program on Collective Action and Property Rights (CAPRi).
Wei Zhang
Wei Zhang is an research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in the Environment and Production Technology Division (EPTD). She leads the research program on ecosystem services under the Natural Resource Management (NRM) theme, and conducts policy-relevant research on the intersection between agriculture, development, and nature.
Ermias Betemariam
Ermias Betemariam is a land health scientist with research interest in land degradation, landscape ecology, restoration ecology, soil carbon dynamics and spatial sciences. He holds B.Sc. degree in Forestry from Alemaya University, Ethiopia; MSc. Degree in Geo-information Sciences and Earth Observation from ITC, The Netherlands; and PhD in Ecology and Natural Resources from University of Bonn, Germany. He worked as a watershed management expert in small and medium scale irrigation projects in Ethiopia. He served as a lecturer in Mekelle University, Ethiopia. Currently he is a land health scientist in the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) with major responsibilities of leading the land health surveillance the Land Health Decisions Theme. He is involved in the development of land health measurement and monitoring protocols, lead research projects across Africa, resource mobilization and capacity development. He is also a focal point for the UNCCD at ICRAF. He has published more than thirty articles in peer reviewed journals mainly in areas of ecology, land use cover dynamics, land degradation and restoration.
James Reed
James Reed is a scientist in the research theme ‘Sustainable Landscapes and Food Systems’. James is interested in inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches that attempt to better understand the dynamics and potential synergies and trade-offs within tropical social-ecological systems. James obtained his PhD from the Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University, UK.
Sarah Jones
Dr Sarah Jones is an Associate Scientist at The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, based in Montpellier, France. Her research focuses on understanding how to diversify farms and landscapes to produce nutritious food in an ecologically and socially sustainable way. Sarah leads the WLE Sustainable Foods through diversity-based practices project (2019-21) through which the team are conducting global meta-analyses and modelling to quantify the impact of diversified farming on biodiversity, soil health, yield stability, and the cost of transitioning from simplified to diversified farms. She co-leads the Alliance Agroecology Transitions Nexus, which focuses on how to implement and scale agroecology for more sustainable food systems. Sarah is a researcher on the EU TRANSITIONS project (2021-24), working on improving metrics and tools for monitoring agroecology, and on the FOLU Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land-use and Energy (FABLE) initiative (2017-present) leading work on quantifying agriculture’s contribution to achieving global biodiversity targets.
Rachel Carmenta
Dr Rachel Carmenta is Tyndall Centre Lecturer in Climate Change and International Development, a position held between the Tyndall Centre and the School of International Development at the university of East Anglia (UEA), UK. Rachel co-leads the Overcoming Poverty with Climate Actions research area within the Tyndall Centre and is part of the Environmental Justice research group. She is particularly interested in the design, performance and social equity of environmental governance in geographies of risk in the Brazilian Amazon and Indonesian peatland frontiers.
Yodit Kebede
Yodit Kebede holds a Ph.D in landscape ecology and an MSc in Soil and Water Conservation from Wageningen University, The Netherlands and an MSc in agricultural engineering from VetAgroSup, France. She has work experiences in agroecology, natural pest control and soil and water management. Yodit works from the field to landscape scale and at both the scientific and policy level. She is currently working as post-doctoral researcher for IRD (French national Research Institute for Development), researching on the scientific and political perceptions of agroecology, particularly in the African context. Prior to this, she worked for UN-FAO agroecology unit where she has been involved in the elaboration of the FAO 10 elements of agroecology, the preparation of the FAO second symposium on agroecology, the management of two GEF (Global Environment Fund) projects in Mali and Burkina-Faso, the inception of a 10-year agroecology programme for 10 countries of West Africa. In her PhD research she analysed the socio-ecological processes that have shaped the landscapes in the region of Hawassa (Ethiopia) to understand some of the ecosystem services that agriculture is providing, particularly pest control. She also has extensive life experience in several African countries including Ethiopia (12 years), Madagascar (6 years) and Guinea (2 years).
