Honey, Someone Shrunk the Sheep!
Sheep on Soay Island off the west coast of Scotland are getting smaller, defying the evolutionary advantage that typically accrues to larger animals when food becomes scarce during cold weather. Increasingly warmer winters have shortened the season of scarcity, enabling smaller sheep to survive — and give birth to more small [...]
Delivering food security to an additional one billion people in Africa will become ever more challenging over the next four decades unless more intelligent management of natural resources and emerging opportunities are brought to bear.
In addressing this and other similar crises, the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development provided some new and sobering costs on how [...]
An Unusually Quiet Sun Baffles Astronomers
Our sun is the quietest it’s been in a long time, producing few solar flares and no sunspots. Instead of becoming more active as it’s 11-year cycle would have predicted, last year’s solar wind pressure and radio emissions were at a 50-year low, and sunspots at a 100-year low, leaving [...]
The world’s farmers must quickly switch to more sustainable and productive farming systems to grow the food needed by a swelling world population and respond to climate change,says the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
“The world has no alternative to pursuing Sustainable Crop Production Intensification to meet the growing food and feed [...]
Crops in Space? Absolutely… especially if people are to travel for months and years to other worlds and systems. It would be impossible, for instance, to send along enough food and water for a team of space explorers on a mission to Mars. The reality is food and water production over a full life cycle [...]
Plant and forestry waste and dedicated energy crops could sustainably replace nearly a third of gasoline use by the year 2030, according to an in-depth study by Sandia National Laboratories and General Motors Corporation called “The 90 Billion Gallon Study.”
Researchers assessed the feasibility, implications, limitations, and enablers of annually producing 90 billion gallons of ethanol [...]
Active development and deployment of businesses and technologies geared towards sustainable development and climate change practices are becoming more vital to the global economy and individual state of living.
Mobilizing and re-focusing the global economy towards investments in clean technologies and ‘natural’ infrastructure such as forests and soils is the best bet for real growth, combating [...]
Globally there will be enough food for a growing world population by the year 2030, but hundreds of millions of people in developing countries will remain hungry and many of the environmental problems caused by agriculture will remain serious, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Population growth is projected to slow down [...]
Globally there will be enough food for a growing world population by the year 2030, but hundreds of millions of people in developing countries will remain hungry and many of the environmental problems caused by agriculture will remain serious, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Population growth is projected to slow down [...]
From time to time, we browse recently released reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and highlight those with potential interest to our readers. Once again, we’ve attempted to loosely categorize the list for your convenience.
If you’re unfamiliar with the CRS, they not only answer Congressional inquiries, they produce outstanding resource documents that are well-researched, [...]
By carefully selecting which varieties of food crops to cultivate, much of Europe and North America could be cooled by up to 1°C (2°F) during the summer growing season, say researchers from the University of Bristol, England. This is equivalent to an annual global cooling of over 0.1°C (2°F), almost 20% of the total global temperature [...]
The rapidly warming global climate is likely to seriously alter crop yields in the tropics and subtropics by 2100, leaving half the world’s population facing serious food shortages, according to new research released this week.
To compound matters, the population of this equatorial belt – from about 35 degrees north latitude to 35 degrees south latitude – [...]
