COINS

A wide range of sustainable land use management (SLM) practices including soil and water conservation, agroforestry, crop-livestock integration, crop diversification, and other climate-smart agricultural practices have been practiced in West Africa. However, despite the promising prospects of these SLM practices several factors inhibit their adoption at scale and the subsequent realization of Sustainable intensification (SI) practices, for instance (i) SIs remain at local scale with limited knowledge of the conditions for scaling to other parts of the sub-region; (ii) the potentials of SIs and challenges in adopting successful SLM technologies are poorly understood to cope with negative impacts of climate change COINS combines socio-economic analysis including incentivization with ecosystem modelling approaches and Earth Observation data, to explore and address potential SI practices and their subsequent adoption at scale. The overarching goal is to enable sustainable farming and land use measures and associated governance mechanisms to improve livelihoods and food security while increasing natural capital by reversing land degradation and increasing resource use efficiencies.

University of Bonn (INRES–LAP) will be in charge of (i) carrying out a literature review of sustainable intensification practices (SI) and collection of agronomic/genetic information, soil, crop management, and weather (ii), carrying out parameterization and calibration of agro-ecosystem models for different SI measures based on ground-truth and remote sensing biophysical data.