 Why are we at Ilri so actively engaged with international water management and with many other regional and national partners on this issue? Traditionally when people think about water management, they think about irrigation and they think about crops. If much, they think about fodder crops. If you look at the literature, livestock systems are being challenged about their efficiency in the use of natural resources, climate change implications and so a few years ago, their first numbers being distributed. We're talking about 100,000 liters of water needed to produce a kilo of beef. These were estimates produced in the Midwest under feedlot conditions with irrigated alfalfa. Now if you look at this part of the world, the Nile basin, livestock are very important element of the farming systems. Obviously the issue of understanding how grazing management, how they use of crop byproducts, how water health, human health issues are impacted by livestock management seemed a very important area of research if we're looking at water management in a comprehensive manner in these watersheds. Let me briefly sum up some of the history of Ilri's interaction with EME, the Challenge Program and a number of partners. This whole development started about 2001 when we started to look at these interactions in the framework of the first phase of the Challenge Program for Water and Food. In 2002 actually of this campus, we had a key workshop with staff from the Ministry of Water and the Ministry of Agriculture and a number of other partners. And this led to an initial agenda on what were the issues, lots of work to place and we I think downloaded a lot of that in this famous document, the comprehensive assessment on water and agriculture, which really brought together a lot of work from many of the partners. Over the years, many projects were undertaken, lots of activities led to new insights and this is very much sort of the stock we're using in this new program. But we also, I think, engaged very actively in capacity building. Many young people did masters, PhDs, postdocs around these issues. That all led to a very productive scientific environment and that was presented to the world, if you want, in 2008 at the second International Forum on Water and Food, organized by the Water and Food Challenge Program here in Addis Ababa, which was, I think, a very very successful stock-taking exercise. I would like to put this new program a bit in context for the CJER in the CJR reform. The type of science which you are going to embark here very much aligns with the efforts to reform the CJR in the direction of producing much more integrative science, addressing complex problems related to poverty, food security, and particularly also sustainable use of natural resources, in this case, water. Ideally, we've been moving in this direction for a number of years. I think we have a tradition of strong systems work, because we realize that livestock is intimately related in most of the poor farmer systems with crops, with natural resources, etc. So crop livestock integration has been a key thrust for us. We absolutely go beyond technology. We recognize the intimate interaction between technology, policy, institutions, and we've moved from just addressing science issues to thinking about innovation, and as a corollary of that, we've engaged in complex partnerships with development partners. Water management, particularly the case of the Blue Nile, fits very much that type of problems which CG wants to contribute to. Mixed crop livestock systems are at the core of the watershed. Livestock are very important, particularly all of you from Ethiopia. I think are very aware of that. We're talking mainly about rain-fed systems. And particularly livestock has a key role to play in the management of the upper watersheds. Issues of water infiltration are very much related to livestock grazing and civil management practices. So as you can see, water and livestock are very close concepts that need to be looked in an integrated manner. I'd like to share with you a few lessons which we have learned at ILRI over the past years in dealing with these types of projects. Maybe some of them might be useful in this context. As I said before, the issue is not just one of technologies. Very much an issue of understanding policies, institutions, and investments. We have learned that gender is absolutely critical to understand household behavior in response to many of these interventions. We frequently hear that NRM interventions are considered location-specific and that this really is a challenge. So frequently they are stated to be of limited impact and not comparable, for example, with plant breeding. So I think this program would have to put a particular effort to have good baselines and good impact studies because that's going to sell this type of science. I think one of the lessons we have learned in a hard way is that you really have to go beyond the diagnostics and small-scale pilots. We need to identify drivers of change and key tipping points. This is absolutely critical to be effective in our investments. We can spend enormous amounts of time and money in characterizing systems, but if something is to change, we need to identify these key drivers and tipping points. Let me give you a few thoughts on how we're trying to do that. Computer modeling and simulation have clear roles to play, as has action research on the ground. And finally, a lot of it is serendipity. But that serendipity feeds on the previous two edge of the simulation, the modeling, and the action research. But furthermore, that serendipity requires an open mind to look at new issues, unbiased, avoiding the usual sort of confirmation bias we frequently have in our science, and accepting surprises, not expected results, in a very open-minded way. I think here, both SIDERS frequently can play a very important role because they have different experiences. This is very much what we have learned in the CJR, that one of our contributions is that, being international, we have seen many of these systems in different environments, under different conditions around the globe, and that gives us an opportunity to think maybe out of the box in terms of many of the things we find in a specific watershed. I think one of the important angles of this program is the fact that it explicitly addresses the problem at a range of different levels. And this, we know from system science, is absolutely critical. If you want to understand the system, you need to look at the nested system within. Here, we will be looking at individual plots, at farms and households, at watersheds, at the regional level, at the value chains. This is very good, but the real challenge is to see how you bring these different perspectives to interact and to talk to each other, and to fertilize the thinking, the mutual thinking. And here, I think in this program, we'll have a key role in this. Communications, knowledge management are absolutely critical to really add value to these analyses at the different levels. I think at ILRI, we can certainly contribute some of our recent experiences. I think we have a very strong team based at this campus working on knowledge management and information. But in the end, it all has to lead to impact at scale. And that means that it's not just a researcher's job. This requires strong alignment with other development partners. And this is why I understand many of you are joining us this morning. It requires an attitude of stewardship of issues. And what really I think is the most challenging part, NRM requires changes in mindsets, in mindsets of policymakers, in mindsets of farmers. I think over the years, we have learned that that is one of the biggest challenges. And I think social marketing, for example, as is being done in health programs on HIV-AIDS and many others, probably has a lot of lessons we need to learn when we want to bring about change in natural resource management. So I think we will have to address and learn about those issues as we go. So this program will be working in the Blue Nile watershed, but I would really like to stress that if successful, this can have very important downstream contributions to the region. And more broadly, I think we are all aware that water is going to be one of the major sources of regional conflicts. And this region has quite a few of those. So we can help diffuse some of those conflicts that will be a very welcome impact of this program. And I think we have quite a bit of evidence that there is value in what's called sort of science diplomacy, getting scientists from different countries to work together, learn about the issues, and learn about how to deal with the trade-offs. Because most of these conflicts will have to be addressed by handling the trade-offs between different interest values, etc. Again here, I think the CGR has a clear role to play. We are an international body, we act as neutral facilitators, and we have scientific credibility. I think this enables us to facilitate a lot of these dialogues. Thank you very much.