Why Smart Cooking Will Help Reduce Air Pollution and Save Lives
Cooking with charcoal poses a serious health and environmental threat to around 3 billion people around the world who cook and heat their houses by burning coal, wood, or crop waste. A Kenyan social enterprise is working to change this by promoting the use of charcoal briquettes made from bagasse, an agricultural waste residue that is a smokeless and long-lasting alternative to charcoal and firewood.
 
Scientists Hope to Cultivate an Immune System for Crops
The world’s crops face a vast army of enemies, from fungi to bacteria to parasitic animals. Farmers have deployed pesticides to protect their plants, but diseases continue to ruin a sizable portion of our food supply. Some scientists are now investigating another potential defense, one already lurking beneath our feet. The complex microbial world in the soil may protect plants much like our immune system protects our bodies.
 
Senegal’s Farmers Adopt New Tool to Boost Harvest: Mobile Phones
West African farmers have long relied on traditional weather indicators to manage their crops, but those have become unreliable as a result of increasingly variable weather patterns. This has huge implications for the region’s agriculture. To remedy this, a Senegalese agency launched a free weather information service via text message for farmers in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Ghana.
 
Scientific Robots to Swim in Bay of Bengal in Monsoon Study
To better understand and predict South Asia’s seasonal monsoon, scientists are getting ready to release robots in the Bay of Bengal in a study of how ocean conditions might affect rainfall patterns. The monsoon delivers more than 70% of India’s annual rainfall and directly affects hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers.
 
FAO Study Identifies Small Fish with a Big Role to Play Feeding Africa’s Drylands
Small, fast growing wild fish could be crucial allies in the race to end hunger in some of the world's most chronically poor regions, according to a new FAO report on fisheries in sub-Saharan Africa. Water is an ephemeral resource in Africa's dryland regions, with water bodies forming and disappearing in a relatively short period of time. Despite this, fish can thrive in these environments, meaning the continent's dryland fisheries are in fact highly productive and resilient.