ALTER aims to demonstrate that there are real and lasting benefits for wide scale poverty alleviation, particularly for the rural poor, by tackling soil degradation at a range of spatial scales, from field to landscape, and using opportunities within agricultural as well as severely degraded land. Throughout the world, soil degradation impacts on the health, wealth and well-being of rural people in many different ways. Soils have a key supporting role in maintaining agricultural yields, water availability, water quality, resources for grazing animals and other ecosystem services. Some are perhaps less obvious but still valued such as maintaining habitats to support honey-bees and local wildlife. In Africa, soil degradation is recognised as a major constraint to alleviating poverty in rural communities. We have chosen to work in Ethiopia and Uganda where there are contrasting issues of soil degradation in mineral and organic soils are a result of agricultural land use but similar reliance in rural communities' on a range of benefits from soils. Solutions to soil degradation are not simple and require a much better understanding of how people benefit from soils, what they stand to gain if they can improve the condition of the soils that they manage whether for crops, livestock, timber production or as semi-natural areas, what they would need to do to accomplish this and what barriers may prevent this. In parallel we need to gain better insight into the likely success of different management options to improve soils. Ultimately these options will require some form of investment whether that be via money, time, resources or other mechanisms. We will investigate the relative pros and cons of these mechanisms from the perspective of local people, organisations involved with markets for Payments for Ecosystem Services and national objectives in alleviating poverty. A broader view of carbon benefits and trading is an opportunity to invest in lasting improvements in degraded ecosystems and the livelihoods of the poor that depend on these. All of this research and evidence building needs to be placed into the context of climate change. We need to establish that whatever might be suitable, acceptable and viable for tackling soil degradation now will have long-term benefits to local people and that these benefits will not be negated by the on-going changes to local climate. The ALTER project is an international consortium between The James Hutton Institute (UK), University of Aberdeen (UK), Hawassa University (Ethiopia), The Ethiopian Government's Southern Agricultural Research Institute (SARI, Ethiopia), Carbon Foundation for East Africa (CAFEA, Uganda) and the International Water Management Institute (Nile Basin & Eastern Africa Office, Ethiopia). This team brings together natural scientists, social scientists and economists to work together with rural communities and other local decision-makers and facilitators to improve our capacity to predict how human-environment linked systems respond to incentives and other drivers change. This predictive capacity is needed to be able to explore whether different options for change could result in substantive poverty alleviation.

The EWA-BELT project aims at developing SI of agriculture productions in organic, agroforestry and mixed crop and livestock farming systems in 38 study areas of 6 countries belonging to East (Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania) and West (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Sierra Leone) Africa. The research activities, carried out in Farmer Field Research Units (FFRU), will address areas including marginalized and/or abandoned lands and existing agricultural lands to increase their yield potential. Through integrated participative researches, innovative tools (FFRU, ICT, Integrated Pest Disease Management - IPDM) and identification and dissemination of best practices, all countries will be linked into an interregional East-West African BELT able to reinforce SI in agriculture. The project will enhance the current scientific knowledge on the adaptation of new and improved traditional crops in different agroecosystems and the impacts of traditional agricultural practices on soil health in terms of nutrients, water retention and organic matter content. EWA-BELT will also investigate the introduction of innovative and appropriate plant protection technologies in the IPDM for key crops and the identification of a set of indicators to be used in the assessment of the SI approach impacts taking into account environmental health and, synergically, economic and social aspects. The project will introduce highly innovative cost-affordable technologies, to be easily used in the field by unskilled personnel. Technical benefits provided by all implemented techniques will be then evaluated for their economic effect on farmers and along the value chain. EWA-BELT will address gender issues and empowering women at every stage of the process. Finally, to maximize the impact, project results (in progress and final achievements) will be yearly disseminated during the “Infopoverty U.N. Conference”, one of the U.N. highest-level initiatives to elaborate strategies and design solutions towards SI.