Vietnam Tries New Tack in Climate-Change Battle: Teach a Man to Fish
Vietnam has set out on perhaps its biggest-ever engineering project: A network of walls designed to hold back rising sea levels that are swamping fertile rice-growing regions. At first glance, it is the kind of multidecade effort that the world’s richer countries might throw their weight behind. What isn’t so straightforward, though, is if developing nations should protect themselves or change practices when faced with rising sea levels and other risks associated with climate change.
 
Why Your Hamburger Might Be Leading To Nitrogen Pollution
Scientists say we've been slow to acknowledge yet another side effect of our taste for meat: nitrogen pollution. Certain forms of nitrogen, when released into the environment, cause a host of problems from contaminating drinking water to destroying the ozone. And most of this problematic nitrogen comes from agriculture, especially from producing meat.
 
Deworming: Now More than Ever, a Best Buy for Development
India recently held the largest single-day public health campaign ever conducted. In schools around the vast country, 270 million children lined up to receive a chewable deworming tablet as part of the government-led National Deworming Day. Parasitic worm infections are among the most common infections worldwide, affecting approximately 1.5 billion of the poorest people in the “global south”—impeding children’s development and educational achievement, and likely affecting the economic development of entire nations.
 
Phone App to Forecast Risk of Crop Failure in Brazil
Changes in weather patterns linked to climate change are challenging the traditional knowledge of family farmers in Brazil, where land is used mainly to grow subsistence amounts of maize, rice, beans, and cassava. In response, a team of researchers developed an app that uses information recorded by farmers to monitor the risk of crop failure. The Agrisupport app will also help farmers by providing information on how to care for their crops, when to plant, and how best to deal with pests.
 
Denmark Opens First Food Waste Supermarket Selling Surplus Produce
A charity has opened Denmark's first ever food surplus supermarket. The store, called Wefood, will sell produce at prices 30-50% cheaper than normal supermarkets. According to its funder, WeFood is the first supermarket of its kind in Denmark, and perhaps the world, as it is not just aimed at low-income shoppers but anyone who is concerned about the amount of food waste produced.