CIAT at 45: Turning Our Eco-efficiency Vision into Reality

2012 marks the 45^th anniversary of CIAT’s successful research on tropical agriculture, conducted in collaboration with hundreds of partners who share our commitment to achieving development impact.

Throughout the year, CIAT will celebrate past achievements, while also looking ahead to new challenges. A central issue we will address is how research can enhance the eco-efficiency of agriculture, so that it offers more for people while taking less from the land, as climate change, rising demand for food, and other forces increase the already huge pressure on tropical agroecosystems.

The eco-efficiency concept will be the focus of several publications as well as various events to be organized at CIAT headquarters in Colombia and elsewhere.

Publications Coinciding with CIAT’s 45^th Anniversary

Convinced that eco-efficiency can serve usefully as a guiding principle for research, CIAT decided several years ago to incorporate this concept into its mission:

To reduce hunger and poverty, and improve human health in the tropics through research aimed at increasing the eco-efficiency of agriculture 

To foster debate and action on the concept, CIAT will launch a new publication series in 2012 – Issues in Tropical Agriculture – whose inaugural volume is titled Eco-Efficiency: From Vision to Reality. Scheduled to be available online by July 2012, the publication offers guidance on how to achieve eco-efficient agriculture by documenting recent advances in research on key production systems and crops. It also explores new avenues by which agricultural research can help achieve further gains in eco-efficiency.

Key messages from this publication are covered in two other CIAT documents:

CIAT Annual Report 2011: Pathways to Eco-Efficient Agriculture
Presents concrete examples showing how the Center’s collaborative research helps make tropical agriculture more eco-efficient.

 
An eight-page, full-color pamphlet summarizes the main content of the publication titled Eco-Efficiency: From Vision to Reality.