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Breeding foresight: Exploring opportunities around climate-smart breeding for future food and nutrition security

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World
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CCAFS
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Background

CCAFS Learning Platform 1, “Ex-ante evaluation and decision support for climate-smart options”, is one of six learning platforms in CCAFS, designed as mechanisms to integrate climate change work across CRPs while providing a facilitated platform for knowledge sharing, integration and coordination. LP1 is one of the three clusters of activities in Flagship 1 of CCAFS, and several centre projects in the CCAFS portfolio contribute directly and indirectly to the work of this CoA. The objectives of LP1 are:

• To address ex-ante evaluation of climate-smart practices, technologies and policies • Help set realistic CSA targets

• Interface with CRP breeding programs and foresight modelling This workshop aims to address the third objective above.

Workshop Objective

The workshop objective was to identify concrete actions that can add value through linking future climate modelling and foresight work with commodity breeding programs to enhance the climate resilience of agricultural systems to the middle of the century.

Workshop participants came with a wide variety of expertise, including plant biotechnology, plant breeding, agricultural and development economics, food policy, ex-ante impact assessment, foresight and targeting, systems analysis, spatial analysis, ecophysiology, crop modelling, and food security.

One of the tasks of the meeting was to explore the state of play and opportunities for collaboration concerning foresight and prioritization in climate-smart breeding. This includes informing the development of product profiles for breeding programs and prioritizing CSA-related traits within a profile. The participants also planned to discuss current knowledge and thinking around the key challenges that breeding needs to overcome to deliver climate-resilient cropping systems in the coming years. This needs to be done in a way that complements the considerable amount of foresight work that is going on in the CGIAR, so identifying the added value of possible new activities was a key part of the workshop. We also hope that some of the discussion around a medium-term plan of work to develop a compelling research strategy (the what and the where) will result in ideas for possible inclusion as one of the global challenges in the CGIAR’s Special Initiative on Climate Change from 2022 onwards.