CGIAR’s new portfolio responds to the challenges of our time

Dr. Ismahane Elouafi

Responding to partner demand and grounded in our comparative advantage, CGIAR’s 2025—30 Research and Innovation Portfolio is designed to deploy science and innovations to tackle the challenges of our time.

The defining challenges of our time – hunger, poverty, biodiversity loss in the context of climate change – set high expectations for transformative solutions.

Target-setting exercises, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement climate targets, and the Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, have described the scale of the transformations that are needed by 2050 or sooner.

There is growing recognition that food, land, and water systems lie at the heart of the world’s ability to achieve these goals and to tackle poverty, hunger, malnutrition, inequality, and biodiversity loss in the context of a rapidly warming planet.

When humanity has faced challenges in the past, ingenuity has provided solutions. In the same way, research will play a critical role in meeting the high expectations from 2020 to 2050. Today, with science we can equip small-scale farmers in the global South with the new technologies, innovations, and know-how they need to produce more and better food with fewer resources, adapt to changing and challenging environments and, at the same time, protect natural resources and biodiversity.

As the world’s largest publicly-funded agrifoods-focused research network, with more than 10,000 staff working in over 80 countries, and extensive partnerships, CGIAR has a criticalrole to play in food, land, and water system transformation.

In this context, CGIAR’s new portfolio, which is currently in development, directly addresses the most significant global challenges across climate change, gender and social inequalities, poor-quality diets, rural poverty, environmental degradation, as well as fragility, conflicts, and violence. In doing so, it considers the ways in which those challenges are affected by key megatrends, such as demographic change, shifting consumption patterns, geopolitical instability, and emerging technologies.

CGIAR’s 2025—30 Research and Innovation Portfolio will focus on the continued, critical need to close production gaps in the face of a broader range of interconnected climate, environmental, social, and geopolitical pressures in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia. In other regions, the portfolio will further sharpen CGIAR’s focus and contributions beyond incremental production increases while leveraging its networks to accelerate South—South learning and exchange.

Through nine CGIAR Programs and three Accelerators, underpinned by CGIAR’s genebank and knowledge assets, the portfolio taking shape now will run for six years from 2025 through 2030. The Programs and Accelerators build on and carry forward a significant share of the work and partnerships of CGIAR’s current, 2022—24 Portfolio of Research Initiatives while creating space for new and emerging opportunities.

Diagram: CGIAR’s 2025—30 Research and Innovation Portfolio. Transforming food, land, and water systems to 2050

The proposed portfolio aims to raise the ambition for CGIAR science and innovations by bringing together and leveraging all of CGIAR’s work, across all Centers and all sources and types of funding. With a small number of entry points, the portfolio aims to make CGIAR’s offer easier to understand, communicate, engage with, and fund.

A series of targeted “Listening Sessions,” consistent with broader elements of CGIAR’s revised Engagement Framework for Partnerships and Advocacy, ensure that the portfolio design process and CGIAR’s research and innovation offer is firmly grounded in partner and stakeholder priorities and interests at the local, national, regional, and global levels.

In addition to global challenges, megatrends, and partner demand, the new Portfolio builds on a careful analysis of CGIAR’s comparative advantage in relation to potential, alternative service providers, and will be informed by a structured priority-setting process that will include an assessment of potential positive and negative impacts and trade-offs across CGIAR’s five Impact Areas. These are, Climate adaptation & mitigation, Environmental health & biodiversity, Gender equality, youth & social inclusion, Nutrition, health & food security, and Poverty reduction, livelihoods & jobs. 

A CGIAR Chief Scientist, currently being recruited, will lead the research portfolio to deliver impact. They will steward CGIAR’s scientific vision, integrating and aligning a wealth of knowledge and resources across our global operations.

CGIAR has the people, the presence and the track record of delivering game-changing innovations to meet the high expectations the scientific community faces today. Through our new portfolio, we are shaping a compelling vision for food, land, and water system transformation to provide food, nutrition, and climate secure future for all.