Navigating the landscape of global sustainable livelihood research: past insights and future trajectory.

Sustainable livelihoods (SL) have emerged as a crucial area of focus in global environmental change research, aligning with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This field is rapidly gaining prominence in sustainability science and has become one of the primary research paradigms. In our study, we conducted scientometrics analysis using the ISI Web of Science core collection database to examine research patterns and frontier areas in SL research. We selected 6441 papers and 265,759 references related to SL published from 1991 to 2020. To achieve this, we employed advanced quantitative analysis tools such as CiteSpace and VOSviewer to quantitatively analyze and visualize the evolution of literature in the SL research field. Our overarching objectives were to understand historical research characteristics, identify the knowledge base, and determine future research trends. The results revealed an exponential increase in SL research documentation since 1991, with the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Center (CGIAR) contributing the highest volume of research documents and citations. Key journals in this field included World Development, Global Environmental Change, Ecological Economics, and Ecology and Society. Notably, Singh RK and Shackleton CM emerged as prolific authors in SL research. Through our analysis, we identified six primary clusters of research areas: livelihoods, conservation, food security, management, climate change, and ecosystem services. Additionally, we found that tags such as rural household, agricultural intensification, cultural intensification, and livelihoods vulnerability remained relevant and represented active research hotspots. By analyzing keyword score relevance, we identified frontier areas in SL research, including mass tourism, solar home systems, artisanal and small-scale mining, forest quality, marine-protected areas, agricultural sustainability, sustainable rangeland management, and indigenous knowledge. These findings provide valuable insights to stakeholders regarding the historical, current, and future trends in SL research, offering strategic opportunities to enhance the sustainability of livelihoods for farmers and rural communities in alignment with the SDGs.

Response and resilience of Asian agrifood systems to COVID-19: An assessment across twenty-five countries and four regional farming and food systems.

Context: The COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting health and economies across the world, although the nature of direct and indirect effects on Asian agrifood systems and food security has not yet been well understood. Objectives: This paper assesses the initial responses of major farming and food systems to COVID-19 in 25 Asian countries, and considers the implications for resilience, food and nutrition security and recovery policies by the governments. Methods: A conceptual systems model was specified including key pathways linking the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 to the resilience and performance of the four principal Asian farming and food systems, viz, lowland rice based; irrigated wheat based; hill mixed; and dryland mixed systems. Based on this framework, a systematic survey of 2504 key informants (4% policy makers, 6% researchers or University staff, 6% extension workers, 65% farmers, and 19% others) in 20 Asian countries was conducted and the results assessed and analysed. Results and conclusion: The principal Asian farming and food systems were moderately resilient to COVID-19, reinforced by government policies in many countries that prioritized food availability and affordability. Rural livelihoods and food security were affected primarily because of disruptions to local labour markets (especially for off-farm work), farm produce markets (notably for perishable foods) and input supply chains (i.e., seeds and fertilisers). The overall effects on system performance were most severe in the irrigated wheat based system and least severe in the hill mixed system, associated in the latter case with greater resilience and diversification and less dependence on external inputs and long market chains. Farming and food systems' resilience and sustainability are critical considerations for recovery policies and programmes, especially in relation to economic performance that initially recovered more slowly than productivity, natural resources status and social capital. Overall, the resilience of Asian farming and food systems was strong because of inherent systems characteristics reinforced by public policies that prioritized staple food production and distribution as well as complementary welfare programmes. With the substantial risks to plant- and animal-sourced food supplies from future zoonoses and the institutional vulnerabilities revealed by COVID-19, efforts to improve resilience should be central to recovery programmes. Significance: This study was the first Asia-wide systems assessment of the effects of COVID-19 on agriculture and food systems, differentiating the effects of the pandemic across the four principal regional farming and food systems in the region.

How Indian agriculture should change after COVID-19.

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the vulnerability of India's Agri food system and accentuated the need for agricultural market reforms and digital solutions to connect farmers to markets, to create safety nets and ensure reasonable working conditions, and to decentralize Agri food systems to make them more resilient.

Public good experiment data of a water game framed to Rajasthan/India.

This dataset belongs to a framed economic field experiment conducted in 2016 in Bhilwara district in Rajasthan state in India. A public good game was framed as dam management challenge. We made incentivized payments based on the game earnings. The data are organized as a panel defined by players and experiment rounds. The dataset contains the experiment decisions in different phases of the experiment as well as socio-economic variables of the anonymized players. The data can be accessed through the Dataverse of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) under the following link: https://doi.org/10.21421/D2/MFT8ZD. The data article is related to the research article Falk et al. [2] on "Experimental games for developing institutional capacity to manage common water infrastructure in India".