Research project
iSPARK: innovation in sustainability, policy, adaptation and resilience in Kenya
- Start date: 1 January 2024
- End date: 31 December 2026
- Value: £1.2 million
- Partners and collaborators: Alliance Biodiversity & CIAT, CGIAR Climate Resilience, CIGAR EIA (Excellence in Agronomy) and KELRO (Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Organisation)
- Primary investigator: Professor Andy Challinor
- Co-investigators: Prof Stephen Whitfield, Dr Chetan Deva
Despite a wealth of cross-disciplinary research data from experimental plots and real-world farming systems, there is a lack tools and metrics for evaluating the extent to which an innovation can succeed in achieving resilience and sustainability. As a result, uptake of proposed agronomic and technological innovations to aid adaptation is often limited.
iSPARK focusses on metrics for sustainable and resilient agriculture that span scales from farmers’ fields to country and from seasons to decades. These metrics will be codeveloped and disseminated with partner organisation KALRO https://www.kalro.org/ and used to feed clearly into two major research programmes:
https://www.cgiar.org/initiative/climate-resilience/
https://www.cgiar.org/initiative/excellence-in-agronomy/