How crop diversity could help secure our future food supply
Diversity within maize. Image source: Sam Fentress, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1293212 16 October is World Food Day (#WFD2016); this year’s theme is ‘Climate is changing. Food and agriculture must too.’ Jennifer Cunniff, plant scientist in CABI’s editorial team looks at how harnessing crop diversity is vital for us to meet the challenge. Of the wide…
Improving crop yield: Looking to the sources and sinks
This week I had the pleasure of heading down to the south coast to attend the Society for Experimental Biology’s main meeting in Brighton. The flagship meeting attracts an international audience covering topics across the animal and plant sciences and also cell biology. For me, the main focus was to attend a plant biology…
Climate change to cause more diet related deaths
A young man in drought conditions in Ethiopia (Author: USAID African Bureau) We are all told to improve our diet; increasing our fruit and vegetable consumption and reducing our red meat intake. But a new study, ‘Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change; a modelling study,’ published in The Lancet…
COP21: Major climate deal agreed in Paris
A landmark agreement to limit global temperature rises to below 2 °C has been announced After two intensive weeks of debate the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) drew to a close on 12th December with a new climate deal on the table. The ambitious global agreement commits the 195 participating parties to hold…
What is a sustainable diet? – a vision from the FENS conference
Climate change may be on everyone’s lips, but we are only just beginning to see how our diets might need to change to help prevent it and deal with the challenges of a growing population. I heard more about the question of sustainable diets at a series of sessions at the FENS conference on nutrition…
Farming tropical insects to feed the world in 2050
Farming edible insects to provide protein for people and in animal feed is seen as a way to meet food demands of the world’s population in 2050. Dr Sarah Beynon, an entomologist, was a guest on BBC radio 4 programme Midweek[18th November 2015] & fellow guests were invited to try cricket flour cookies and mealworm burgers. She is on a mission to both educate the UK public on the importance of insects (including wasps and spiders) and to provide sustainable food by farming tropical insects. CABI’s role in ProteINSECT, the EU project trialling insect protein in animal feed, is highlighted.
Ambitious landscape restoration target may be within reach
In September 2011, at a high-level meeting of world leaders, the Bonn Challenge was launched, with an ambitious goal to restore 150 million hectares of the world’s degraded and deforested land by 2020. This target was recently supplemented by the New York Declaration on Forests, which added an further 200 million hectares to be restored…
New sustainable development goals for 2030
This past weekend world leaders gathered at a United Nations Global Summit in New York to make the world a better place to live by 2030. They signed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and ratified 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). The new goals will become applicable from January 2016 and are expected to influence…
New report reveals the true cost of land degradation
Why we need to value our ecosystem services A recent report The Value of Land: Prosperous lands and positive rewards through sustainable land management published 15th September by the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative (ELD) estimates the value of ecosystem services lost worldwide due to land degradation at a staggering US $6.3 trillion to $10.6 trillion…
Indonesia’s mangroves key to climate change mitigation, says study
Mangrove forests in Indonesia store approximately 3.14 billion tonnes of carbon, therefore protection of these ecosystems should be considered a major priority in terms of global climate change mitigation, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.