Millennium Villages Project (MVP)

The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages themselves are showing that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 and escape the poverty trap. Improving food security and nutrition is a key component of the Millennium Villages project. By increasing crop yield, communities in rural Africa can combat hunger and malnutrition, boost their income through the sale of cash crops, guard their families from food shortages, generate savings, and create opportunities to take on other income-generating activities.

Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program (TAP)

The Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program (TAP) is dedicated to addressing the interactions between agricultural production, environmental quality and human well-being. It uses science, technology, management and policy tools to improve environmental quality, nutrition and farmers' incomes through sustainable agricultural practices in developing countries.

International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI)

Climate has always presented a challenge to farmers, herders, fishermen and others whose livelihoods are closely linked to their environment, particularly those in poor areas of the world. A type of insurance called index insurance now offers significant opportunities for managing climate risk in developing countries. The International Research Institute for Climate and Society has helped to develop index insurance programs in a number of countries, and it is working to find ways to overcome the technical and operational challenges that currently limit the growth and spread of index insurance.

IRI has partnered with the United Nations Development Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, Oxfam America, Swiss Re, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the World Food Programme to implement this important work. In 2009, the partners published “Index Insurance and Climate Risk: Prospects for Development and Disaster Management,” which detailed the successes and challenges of using index insurance to reduce poverty and meet development goals.

Urban Design Lab (UDL)

The globalization of food systems and advances in food technologies, while yielding clear benefits, have increasingly come under the scrutiny of concerned politicians and the general public for their increasingly negative impacts on public health and the environment. It is essential to envision a balanced approach to feeding today's new urban demographic by reconsidering how food is produced, processed and consumed. Global problems of food access and affordability, food security, and the double burden of malnutrition and obesity in both the developed and developing worlds challenge us to rethink the function of our food system and the form of our cities.

The Urban Design Lab (UDL) explores food and urbanization, including the energy requirements for a sustainable urban agriculture that would rebalance access to the food chain and help curb the obesity epidemic. The New York Regional Foodshed Modeling Project examines urban and suburban food sourcing and distribution to help achieve an integrated national food system that curbs childhood obesity and other food-related health problems.

Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)

The Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) is a collaboration between the Earth Institute, African scientists and institutions, and other partners from around the world to develop detailed digital maps of soils in 42 countries of sub-Saharan Africa in support of sustainable agriculture. The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) is helping to build information systems for collecting, analyzing and disseminating the data to a wide range of users.

Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)

Economic globalization is exerting an enormous impact on human and natural systems in Latin America and the Caribbean. To address this challenge, this project takes a multidisciplinary and multi-scale approach to exploring how land use patterns are affected by demographic, economic and ecological factors in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) is examining two major patterns: first, extensive conversion of natural ecosystems to modern agriculture, particularly in areas with little topographic relief, and second, abandonment of marginal agricultural and grazing lands, particularly in mountainous and remote regions, which permits ecosystem recovery.

International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI)

Climate change is intensifying the difficult challenges of sustainably feeding a growing global population and securing rural livelihoods. The Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) program, launched by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, aims to overcome climate-related threats to food security, livelihoods and environment in the developing world, starting with East and West Africa and South Asia. The IRI has played a significant role in the design of CCAFS, and it leads the theme on Adaptation through Managing Climate Risk, one of the program's four themes. The IRI oversees research on risk management innovations for resilient rural livelihoods; management of climate risk through food delivery, trade and crisis response; and value-added climate information products and services for agriculture and food security.