Oasis is still in its early stages, so its activities are under active planning. They stem directly from the priorities identified by its research partners and stakeholders. Oasis has engaged a continuing series of consultative events since 2002.

Intractable research questions have lingered, constraining progress against desertification because of the absence of a coordinated global scientific effort to tackle them. Oasis brings together the right mix of inter-disciplinary advanced science with on-the-ground partnerships to make major gains in these areas.

 

Below are the short synopses for each KStream

 

KStream 1. Co-learning among stakeholders for more effective dryland research-for-development

Past experiences amply demonstrate that insufficient attention to cross-sectoral joint learning and participation among stakeholders has been a major constraint to overcoming dryland degradation. KStream 1 will place co-learning front-and-center in Oasis. It is a cross-cutting KStream that will pull in staff time from its sister KStreams to ensure a seamless connection and vigorous interaction with them. It will also interface directly with stakeholders, partners and beneficiaries. KStream 1 will both perform innovative research on co-learning, and will implement co-learning processes within the Oasis agenda, in order to increase the effectiveness of work, build partner capacities through active mutual learning rather than didactic training, and to ensure stakeholder buy-in from the start of this Challenge Programme.

 

KStream 2. Understanding the drivers of dryland degradation from a sustainable development perspective

As argued by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (discussed earlier), a quantitative understanding of dryland degradation and desertification is essential for a scientific approach to combating it. This KStream will approach land degradation assessment from the perspective of a development problem/opportunity, integrating human/social systems analysis through co-learning approaches, with biophysical analysis. It will create cost-effective and accurate tools and methodologies for quantifying land degradation; reveal needs and opportunities for alternative development scenarios associated with more sustainable land management practices; enable the quantification of investment requirements needed to rehabilitate and sustain drylands; and validate methodologies for estimating the costs of inaction (business as usual). KStream 2 will employ leading-edge remote sensing combined with ground-truthing and advanced statistical analysis. It will derive IPG principles and methodologies for holistic assessment of the dynamics of land degradation. Research at benchmark sites will produce rigorous and robust methodologies suitable for wide up- and out-scaling.

 

KStream 3. Improving landscape, soil, water, nutrient and biodiversity management

Dryland landscapes are denuded by overgrazing, overtillage, and deforestation, and then stripped of topsoil by wind and water erosion. Flash floodwater races across the degraded soil surface before nutrient-starved crops and livestock can capture it. This is the paradox of ‘waste amidst scarcity’: despite the scarcity of precious natural resources, much is never utilized (e.g. Breman 1992).
Solutions to these problems are achievable through sustainable land management research, but need to be co-developed with stakeholders so they are relevant, affordable and adoptable. Much past research has been at the field and plot level and dependent on costly external inputs. Impoverished rural dryland dwellers, though are mainly dependent on local natural resources, which are heavily influenced by landscape scale2 drivers (e.g. catchments, slopes, basins, rangelands, forests, soil geo-morphological groups, etc.)

KS2 will research opportunities to enhance landscape, water and nutrient assets and resources through better landscape management and tighter resource capture and recycling, including the roles of trees, shrubs, animals, livestock, improved varieties and other biodiversity assets. A major strategy will be to devise means to buffer dryland systems against the extreme weather variability that is expected to worsen with climate change, e.g. though more diverse and resilient tree-crop-livestock systems (trees moderate micro-climates and protect soils, among other benefits).

Smallholder-appropriate water harvesting and irrigation, integrated organic matter and supplemental fertilizer management are also key to devising agricultural systems that answer the core question of Oasis: finding systems that simultaneously build livelihoods while saving lands.

 

KStream 4. Policy, market and institutional and options to combat dryland degradation

Policy, market and institutional (PMI) drivers are prominent in most land degradation situations. Typically these include overlapping and insecure property rights, poorly functioning output, input and credit markets, political marginalization and lack of public investment in dryland areas, insufficient incentives to address the external effects of private actions on ecosystem services, difficulties of attaining effective collective action in managing common pool resources such as forests, rangelands, policies subsidizing producers in wealthy countries, and others.

Factors such as these are often overlooked, though in initiatives to reduce land degradation and poverty in drylands. Contrary to common assumptions, there are often good opportunities for profitable and sustainable investments in dryland areas when PMIs are supportive of sustainable and productive land use options. This KStream pursues such PMI options in close integration and co-learning mode with sister KStreams that generate and integrate such options.

 

KStream 5. Livelihood options that reward better dryland care

Poverty is a key driver of dryland degradation; the poor have little choice but to ‘mine’ the land in order to survive. More remunerative yet sustainable land-use options might enable them to invest in their lands to further increase profits in ways that also protect and enhance their lands, climbing out of the poverty-land degradation trap. The relative lack of past attention to diversification in the drylands creates the potential for major gains and high returns to research investments. KStream 5 will seek higher income-generating options by exploring and exploiting sustainability, risk-management and resilience principles such as crop diversification, sustainable forestry, tree-crop-livestock integration (in co-learning mode with KStream 3), value addition to postharvest products, market connections (jointly with KStreams 4 and 6), and other promising livelihood options.

Alternative livelihood options, conditioning factors and adoption dynamics in the drylands will be researched and analytical procedures developed. Target domain typologies will be generated and matched to congruent solutions. Since system changes are likely to be knowledge-intensive, up-scalability issues will receive careful attention, using co-learning approaches to understand land-user constraints and motivations.

 

KStream 6. Development pathways that build lives while saving lands

Over millennia, land users have transitioned from hunting-gathering, to subsistence-oriented cultivation and animal husbandry, to intensive commercial cultivation systems. These can be viewed as “development pathways” reflecting systems innovation by land users and societies to adapt to changing social structures, natural resource assets, economies and markets.

But such transitions were neither quick nor easy. In the same way, transitions today from land-degrading dryland systems to markedly different systems will require a numerous non-trivial changes in crops, crop/livestock management practices, marketing alliances, etc.

KStreams 3, 4 and 5 develop promising new options for building lives-saving lands, but the transition process itself is a researchable challenge that is important for translating solutions into large-scale payoffs. KStream 6 will research development pathways that enable land users to move expeditiously from one innovation to the next, towards the Oasis goal of prosperous yet sustainable livelihoods.

Some examples of development pathways include staple food crops for subsistence and security, sustainable forestry, rangeland extensification, diversification into high-value markets, off-farm labor, and even paid delivery of environmental services to society. This KStream will assess various agriculturally-based development pathways, form conceptual models for different socio-economic, infrastructural, marketing and natural resource base endowments, and propose effective ways to test, validate and upscale successful alternatives. Models and innovation systems frameworks will be developed to represent this dynamism and place it in a strategic IPG framework.

By paying careful attention to the process of transition along development pathways relevant to the drylands, in a co-learning mode, Oasis will enhance partner skills and confidence in development pathway thinking, significantly accelerating and expanding the pace and scope of mass customization, and hence increasing impact.