As part of the the World Bank's review of its rural development strategy, the Bank sought the assistance of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in evaluating how farming systems might change and adapt over the next thirty years. Amongst other objectives, the World Bank asked FAO to provide guidance on priorities for investment in food security, poverty reduction, and economic growth, and in particular to identify promising approaches and technologies that will contribute to these goals. The results of the study are summarized in a set of seven documents, comprising six regional reports and the global overview contained in this volume. This document, which synthesises the results of the six regional analyses as well as discussing global trends, cross-cutting issues and possible implementation modalities, presents an overview of the complete study. This document is supplemented by two case study reports of development issues of importance to farming systems globally.

WRIA_DEM: Hydrologically filled GTopo30 DEM with the main stems of cartographic rivers "burned-in" for irrigation analysis. GT30/GTopo30 is Global Topographic 30 arc second DEM database, nominal 1km postings; DEM is Digital Elevation Model. The WRIALAEA grid data layer is comprised of 9194x8736 derivative raster hydrologically filled dem features derived based on 1 kilometer data originally from FAO.

As part of the the World Bank's review of its rural development strategy, the Bank sought the assistance of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in evaluating how farming systems might change and adapt over the next thirty years. Amongst other objectives, the World Bank asked FAO to provide guidance on priorities for investment in food security, poverty reduction, and economic growth, and in particular to identify promising approaches and technologies that will contribute to these goals. The results of the study are summarized in a set of seven documents, comprising six regional reports and the global overview contained in this volume. This document, which synthesises the results of the six regional analyses as well as discussing global trends, cross-cutting issues and possible implementation modalities, presents an overview of the complete study. This document is supplemented by two case study reports of development issues of importance to farming systems globally.

Digital Terrain Model within the Okavango Basin. Source: Data generated under the GIS EPSMO program (base:SRTM data). This dataset is part of the GIS Database for the Environment Protection and Sustainable Management of the Okavango River Basin project (EPSMO). Detailed information on the database can be found in the “GIS Database for the EPSMO Project” document produced by Luis Veríssimo (FAO consultant) in July 2009, and here available for download.

The datasets represent monthly Sensible and Latent Heat Flux at 0.5 degree spatial resolution from 1982 - 2010 over the African continent. For a detailed description of the data sets see: Jung, M. et all. (2011) Global patterns of land-atmosphere fluxes of carbon dioxide, latent heat, and sensible heat derived from eddy covariance, satellite, and meteorological observations. Journal of Geophysical Research - Biogeosciences, 116, doi:10.1029/2010JG001566. request by email. This data set has been produced in the framework of the "Climate change predictions in Sub-Saharan Africa: impacts and adaptations (ClimAfrica)" project, Work Package 1 (WP1). WP1 (Past climate variability) aimed to provide consolidated data to other WPs in ClimAfrica, and to analyze the interactions between climate variability, water availability and ecosystem productivity of Sub-Saharan Africa. Various data streams that diagnose the variability of the climate, in particular the water cycle, and the productivity of ecosystems in the past decades, have been collected, analyzed and synthesized. The data streams range from ground-based observations and satellite remote sensing to model simulations. More information on ClimAfrica project is provided in the Supplemental Information section of this metadata.

Delineation of Communal Conservancies in Namibia, that share geographical overlapping with the Okavango Basin. Source: Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry of Namibia. This dataset is part of the GIS Database for the Environment Protection and Sustainable Management of the Okavango River Basin project (EPSMO). Detailed information on the database can be found in the “GIS Database for the EPSMO Project” document produced by Luis Veríssimo (FAO consultant) in July 2009, and here available for download.

Location of boreholes, in Namibia, that share geographical overlapping with the Okavango Basin. Source: Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry of Namibia. This dataset is part of the GIS Database for the Environment Protection and Sustainable Management of the Okavango River Basin project (EPSMO). Detailed information on the database can be found in the “GIS Database for the EPSMO Project” document produced by Luis Veríssimo (FAO consultant) in July 2009, and here available for download.

This raster layer (90m resolution) identifies stream segments in the CORB-Contributing area. Each segment has a specific grid code, which will be fundamental in later modelling of the hydrological network. Source: This layer was created by computations of the Flow Direction and Stream Segmentation raster grids. This dataset is part of the GIS Database for the Environment Protection and Sustainable Management of the Okavango River Basin project (EPSMO). Detailed information on the database can be found in the “GIS Database for the EPSMO Project” document produced by Luis Veríssimo (FAO consultant) in July 2009, and here available for download.

The “natural resources sensitivity” symbolizes the ecosystem vitality and degree of conservation in 2010. Deforestation and loss of water resources quality may render certain areas more sensitive to climate stressors on account of the loss of normal vegetation cover, the depletion of biodiversity, the reduction in ecosystem services and significant loss of beneficial assets. The index results from the first cluster of the Principal Component Analysis preformed among 16 potential variables. The analysis identify five dominant variables, namely “water availability per capita”, “net primary production”, “forest accessibility”, “vegetation continuity” and “climatic resources availability”, assigning respectively the weights of 0.19, 0.21, 0.165, 0.21 and 0.225. Before to perform the analysis the variables “water availability per capita”, “forest accessibility” and “vegetation continuity” were log transformed to shorten the extreme variation and then together with the other two variables were score-standardized (converted to distribution with average of 0 and standard deviation of 1; all variables with inverse method) in order to be comparable. The 6 arc-minute grid “water availability per capita” of 2005 was computed by sum of the run-off and discharge grids produced by World Water Development Report II and then sampled at 0.5 arc-minutes. A focal statistic ran with a radius of 55 cells (about 50 Km). This had a smoothing effect and represents some of the extend influence of major rivers as a resources for local people. To calculate the available water per capita it was then divided by the population. The 5 arc-minute grid “net primary production” of 2000 was gathered from FAO GeoNetwork and sampled at 0.5 arc-minute. Also in this case a focal statistic ran with a radius of 22 cells (about 20 Km) in order to represents the extend effect of primary production as natural resources for local people. The 0.5 arc-minute grid “forest accessibility” was build using the grid of travel distance in minutes to large cities (which one with population greater than 50,000 people), produced by the European Commission and the World Bank to represent the connectivity in 2000, and the grid of forest occurrence, extracted from the FAO Global Land Cover-SHARE dataset of 2014. The result measures the distance in minutes between forest and cities, thus is a proxy for remoteness and naturalness of forest. The 0.125 arc-minute grid “vegetation continuity” of 2010 were collected from University of Maryland and NASA and sampled at 0.5 arc-minute. A focal statistic ran with a radius of 55 cells (about 50 Km). This had a smoothing effect and represents some of the extend influence of vegetation concentration as a resources for local people. Finally the 0.5 arc-minute grid “climatic resources availability” was produced within the ClimAfrica project. The “water availability per capita” represents the potential water available per people in a certain area. We can consider the area with small values more sensitive to climatic stress, because lack a buffer of water resources, precious in a prevalently rain-fed agricultural system like in Africa. The “net primary production” and the “vegetation continuity” are proxies of the potential vegetal productivity available in a certain area. Moreover “vegetation continuity” is an indicator of abundance of natural ecosystem services that can reduce the sensitivity of human-environment systems. The “forest accessibility” assessing the distance between human and natural system measure the anthropogenic degree of a forest. A forest recording a high anthropogenic degree (thus near in terms of minute from a city) may potentially be threaded by human activity and thus represent a fragile ecosystem. Finally the “climatic resources availability” is an indicator of the climatic potential for biomass production. It is based on the climatically determined biomass productivity index that is a proxy for the atmospheric energy available for biomass production, as expressed by accumulated temperature, adjusted for drought stress. This dataset has been produced in the framework of the “Climate change predictions in Sub-Saharan Africa: impacts and adaptations (ClimAfrica)” project, Work Package 4 (WP4). More information on ClimAfrica project is provided in the Supplemental Information section of this metadata.

Geology and Hydrogeology Map of Angola, that shares geographical overlapping with the Okavango Basin. Source: Instituto de Geodesia e Cartografia de Angola (IGCA), Luanda. Original data georeferenced under the GIS EPSMO program. This dataset is part of the GIS Database for the Environment Protection and Sustainable Management of the Okavango River Basin project (EPSMO). Detailed information on the database can be found in the “GIS Database for the EPSMO Project” document produced by Luis Veríssimo (FAO consultant) in July 2009, and here available for download.