Subsistence farmer work their field of maize after late rains near the capital Lilongwe, Malawi. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings
New Crops, Technology Needed to Help Farmers Adapt to Rising Heat: Gates Foundation
New technologies are the key to helping Africa and Asia’s smallholder farmers adapt to climate change. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation unveiled a $300 million plan to help farmers, with funds going to the development of crops that could cope with rising temperatures, wild weather, and attacks from new pests and diseases.
Guest Commentary—Food Waste: Breaking Down the Issue that Won’t Break Down
Food waste threatens our ecological future and worsens climate change. The problem is that food waste is not just a singular issue—it is the culmination of its subsidiary issues makes food waste so dangerous. Jordan Henderson, a fall intern with the Council’s Global Food and Agriculture Program, breaks down this complex issue and highlights promising solutions to save resources and reduce costs.
How the Food Industry Uses Cavitation, the Ocean's Most Powerful Punch
Cavitation is when low pressure in a liquid produces a bubble that rapidly collapses, and heats up to 20,000 Kelvin. In brewing beer, cavitation processed and converted more of the starch in barley to brewable sugars in less time, at lower temperatures. It can also neutralize a large spectrum of spoiling and harmful microbes much more effectively and efficiently than most other technologies.
Wind Energy Is Supposed to Help Fight Climate Change. It Turns out Climate Change Is Fighting Back
A changing climate is beginning to change wind energy’s potential to provide power in key regions, part of what could be a broader diminishment of a key renewable energy source in part of the world. While the world is turning more and more to renewable sources of energy to fight climate change, climate change itself alters the distribution of wind, changing, and even shrinking the regional potential of this energy source.
The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster
The UN envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—and this would need to happen by midcentury. Which raises a question: has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?