In parts of the world already facing unreliable food supplies, an uncertain climate adds to the future stress for soils, plants and people. March 20, 2008
The water shortage that threatens humanity will have wide-ranging consequences for agriculture and energy production, requiring significant shifts in the way this precious resource is managed. (editorial) 20 March 2008
Global energy consumption is expected to grow by 50% by 2030, squeezing already scarce water resources. Mike Hightower and Suzanne A. Pierce recommend ways to integrate water and energy planning. March 20, 2008
All-or-nothing targets for global access to basic amenities such as drinking water and sanitation are outdated. The time has come for a more fluid approach. March 20, 2008
Water (either from the sky or the irrigation canal) is often a key factor in determining crop yields, squeezing more crop out of the same drop will be central to one of the biggest challenges of this century: sustainably feeding a population of perhaps 9 billion people in a climate-changed …
Climate change, growing populations and political concerns are prompting governments and investors from California to China to take a fresh look at desalination : a report. March 20, 2008
Growing food has always been a struggle, and it is only thanks to modern agricultural research that most people now have enough to eat. Today we need that research more than ever. The growing demand for meat can only add to the strain on grain supplies, as livestock need to …
Late last month the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in Longyearbyen, on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The facility is nothing less than a Noah's ark of plants for the 21st century, aiming to preserve the world's crop biodiversity while we still have a fighting chance.
A wheat disease that could destroy most of the world's main wheat crops could strike south Asia's vast wheat fields two years earlier than research had suggested, leaving millions to starve. The fungus, called Ug99, has spread from Africa to Iran, and may already be in Pakistan.
The growing volumes of fresh water held behind dams in the world's artificial reservoirs have had an appreciable mitigating effect on rising sea levels, according to a surprising study published today in the journal Science. Researchers at Taiwan's National Central University carried out the first comprehensive global assessment of water …
Dinosaurs might have known a surprising amount about what we think of as a quintessentially modern problem: global warming. Fossilised vegetation from 65 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period, reveals that central Siberia was a lot like modern-day Florida, with lush ferns and lots of rain.
Global economic growth during the past century has lifted many into lives of unprecedented luxury.The cost has been the degradation of vital ecosystems
Later this month, the first batch of seeds will be stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to ensure that should a major catastrophe ever hit the planet, survivors should at least have access to a seed bank and so may be able to grow food. Eventually, over 200000 crop …
ELLIOT JOSLIN, a pioneering American researcher, argued vociferously until his death in 1962 that controlling the level of glucose in a person's bloodstream was the key to managing type 2 diabetes (the variant of the disease that appears later in life). Since the defining symptom of all types of diabetes …
This conference has been organized out of widespread the environmental degradation, global warming, biodiversity threats and the increasing conflicts of violence around the world.
