Ecosystem services are essential for directly and indirectly assuring the food security and nutritional diversity of rural communities, with major implications for the poorest and most vulnerable households. In this new line of investigation, ecosystem services will be analyzed through the lens of four main dimensions (or pillars) that should be simultaneously present in order to be food secure: availability, access, utilization and stability.

El pasado martes 21 de mayo se llevó a cabo el Seminario para el Proyecto de Colaboración Género y Cambio Climático. A dicho evento asistieron integrantes e investigadores del CIAT-CCAFS y miembros de la Fundación EcoHabitats del municipio de Popayán. El objetivo de la reunión fue presentar las propuestas de los estudiantes investigadores a realizar en el departamento del Cauca, y buscar tanto un objetivo como una metodología conjunta a implementar. Con esto se busca emprender un programa colaboración integrada entre el CIAT y comunidades del Cauca, y dar impulso a los proyectos en cuestiones de género.

I consider myself a young researcher, with plenty of years left in me to solve some of the problems society faces in terms of climate change.  But it is a little disconcerting when I discover that I’ll be retired by the time global climate models are of sufficient quality to plug directly into agricultural models. 
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Yesterday we had a field visit out to Machakos District in Kenya, following the bean value chain.  We saw research which is developing the next generation of bean varieties, through to farmers eking a living out of their bean fields, finishing with the highly motivated entrepreneurs who are making the markets work for the farmers.  We
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For many rural households ‘wild’ edible plants, including weeds and other so-called Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFP’s), provide a substantial part of the daily diet. However, many are considered weeds by most agricultural scientists, and therefore undesirable. But besides their nutritional value these plants have other uses, such as in local medicines, handicrafts and rituals. The idea that weeds can be culturally important for farmers is a key finding of recent research conducted by Cruz-Garcia and Price (2012) in the Kalasin Province, northeast of Thailand.