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Following the recent Strategic Planning process, IWMI has refined its research framework to better reflect the broader water-food-environment challenges. As part of the new framework, IWMI has organized its research around four main activities: mapping water productivity; mapping water poverty; analyzing high potential interventions and assessing impacts.
Corresponding with this refined research framework, IWMI’s thematic structure has also been tightened from the previous five themes to four new themes, with two cross-cutting Communities of Practice devoted to issues of policies and institutions as well as human health.
The new research themes are as follows:
Theme 1: Basin Water Management
This research theme provides the overarching context for IWMI’s research on water productivity and water poverty across the hydrological cycle at the basin scale, and sets the agenda for the development, application and impact assessment of interventions at finer scales aimed at improving agricultural productivity, rural incomes, human and environmental health.
Theme 2: Land, Water and Livelihoods
Within the context of Theme 1, the Land, Water and Livelihoods theme focuses on identifying and testing technological, policy and institutional interventions to conserve resources and increase land and water productivity.
Theme 3: Agriculture, Water and Cities
This research theme explores the rural-urban interface and interventions that can help ensure the safe and productive use of wastewaters and the sustainability of high input peri-urban systems.
Theme 4: Water Management and Environment
The Water Management and Environment theme examines farm, field and system level interventions to better balance productivity and environmental objectives as well as the impacts of proposed interventions at the basin scale.
Together, these four new themes and cross-cutting research areas aim to 1) increase the understanding of land and water productivity and its relationship to poverty, 2) identify promising interventions to improve the productivity and sustainability of the natural resource base as well as the access to productive resources, and 3) assess the impacts of such interventions on productivity, livelihoods, health and resource sustainability. This sharpened research focus clearly supports IWMI’s mission of ‘Improved water and land management for food, livelihoods and nature’ as well as the institute’s underlying research question of ‘How can we grow more food and sustain rural livelihoods with less water in a manner that is socially acceptable and environmentally sustainable?’
Theme 1: Water for Agriculture
Theme 2: Smallholder Livelihoods