The CGIAR’S Independent Science and Partnership Council (ISPC) has just opened registration for the upcoming SCIENCE FORUM 2018 (SF18) on “Win more, lose less: Capturing synergies between SDGs through agricultural research”.

A focus on productivity alone distorts many agri-food systems. GFAR puts farmers and communities, rather than technologies, at the centre of innovation, working from development demands back to required innovations, with farmers and society engaged as clients and actors throughout. As part of our work to strengthen knowledge management and policy advocacy, towards better investments in transformed agri-food innovation systems, GFAR is working to bring together new quantitative and qualitative metrics for SDG impacts from innovation, across many partners, in different contexts and scales, as a multi-stakeholder space for learning and advocacy. To this end, the CGIAR’s Independent Science and Partnership Council’s Science Forum is highly relevant. SF18, to be held from 10-12 October 2018 in Stellenbosch, South Africa, aims to identify substantial interactions between the Sustainable Development Goals (both positive and negative), the role of agricultural research in augmenting synergies and managing trade-offs, and the ensuing implications for the science-policy interface. 

Key topics include:

• Interactions between increasing staple crop productivity, resilience to climate change, improving nutrition and sustaining agro-biodiversity
• Interactions between intensifying livestock production for food and nutrition security, and: a) increased vulnerability to antimicrobial resistance and zoonoses; b) land use change
• Water-energy-food (WEF) nexus interactions
• Strengthening the science-policy interface 

ISPC is a part of CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food secure future dedicated to achieving a world free of poverty, hunger and environmental degradation. We are a standing panel of scientific experts whose mission is to help strengthen the quality, relevance, and impact of CGIAR research by enhancing the CGIAR System Council’s capacity to make evidence-based decisions in support of effective agricultural research programs for sustainable development.

SF18 website: https://www.scienceforum2018.org