Everyone on campus was shocked at the sudden passing of Philippe Lemperiere, IWMI on 4 February. Philippe established the IWMI office in Addis Ababa, with a French funded project in 2003 and worked here until 2007. He rejoined IWMI in February 2013 as Irrigation Specialist. Many people attended the memorial event for Philippe on 7 February, when a tree was planted in his memory outside the cafeteria.

On 4 February I opened a workshop in Addis of the Livestock Identification and Traceabilty Systems project, which is funded by USAID and led by Bernard Bett and Florence Mutua from the Food Safety and Zoonoses Program. The project is working with IGAD and its member states to develop a system to identify and track animals through the value chain. This is especially important for the IGAD countries, where export of animals and animal products is growing rapidly, to allow effective monitoring of animal movements in relation to disease and food safety. The workshop was attended by the Chief Veterinary Officers, or their representatives, of most IGAD countries as well as researchers and experts from other countries. The participants agreed to move agreed to move ahead and introduce and test a pilot system.

I also attended the Society of Range Management Conference in Orlando, Florida. There was no sign of Mickey Mouse but there were over 500 delegates. On the last day of the conference a side symposium was held on climate change and pastoralism, bringing together about 70 people from around the world who are working on pastoral systems in America, Africa, Asia and Europe. The symposium highlighted both the challenges and the opportunities of pastoral systems and the communities who depend on them. There was strong commitment from the attendees to promote the advantages and opportunities of pastoralism. I delivered the closing keynote address (co-authored by Andrew Mude, Polly Ericksen and Klaus Butterbach-Bahl). This gave me an opportunity to discuss some of the research I carried out in Central Asia 10 years ago as well as more recent work by ILRI and others.

Congratulations to Metasebia Zelalem from ICT who has been chosen from applicants across CGIAR to be seconded as the first ‘ICT Fellow’ for a year at the Consortium Office in Montpellier, France. This is an honour to Metasebia and ILRI. These secondments are designed to allow the Consortium to better understand the operations in the Centres and vice versa. Metasebia, we’ll miss you for a year but we look forward to hearing about life on the shores of the Mediterranean!!