Climate change can have severe knock-on effects for food security.The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme.Agroecology, with its chemicals-free and traditionally-led principles, could make the world's food systems more resilient, according to a UN report.But critics say there are issues in food production that the agroecological approach may not be able to address. Conflict, the climate crisis and ...

Steve Holliday, President of the Energy Institute, highlights an under-discussed challenge of the transition to net-zero.A new survey of professionals across the UK energy sector highlights the need for skilled people to power new technology.These skills are needed now and into the future, meaning we need to inspire future generation. When we look out to 2050 and the transformation of the global energy system required to avert the climate crisis,...

International financial markets have opened a window for African governments to diversify their funding sources from traditional multilateral institutions and foreign aid. For example, they can now borrow through issuing Eurobonds – these are international bonds issued by a country in a foreign currency, usually in US dollars and euros. South Africa was the first to issue Eurobonds in 1995. To date, 21 African countries have sold Eurobonds worth ...

Artificial intelligence could help in the fight against climate change.AI applications could help design more energy-efficient buildings, improve power storage and optimise renewable energy deployment by feeding solar and wind power into the electricity grid as needed.By 2030, the tech could help cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 4%, according to a recent study by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for Microsoft.But there are energy cons...

Any notion that COVID-19 was going to last for just a few months was very much misplaced in 2020. Especially after it was recognised that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was largely spread through the airborne route, all indications were that it would cause repeat bouts of waves. This is what happened in the flu epidemic of 1918. In addition very few scientists predicted that we would see the type of mutations that occurred over such a short period of time....

Today, an extremely important report on the physical science of climate change will be released to the world. Produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the report will give world leaders the most up-to-date information about climate change to inform their policies. It is an enormous undertaking, and has been a long time coming. This report is the culmination of a marathon five-year assessment, writing, review and approval ...

The demands detailed in the new "Five-Point Plan for Solidarity, Fairness, and Prosperity" paper include delivery of promised climate financing.Ahead of a key climate summit later this year, over 100 developing nations on Thursday released a set of demands calling on richer countries to "take responsibility" for their disproportionate role in the global crisis by, among other policies, swiftly and transparently delivering a promised $100 billion ...

Germany's continued obstruction of the TRIPS waiver "means more people will die when they could have been saved if they had access to life-saving vaccines." When German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday for a White House summit to discuss "ending the Covid-19 pandemic," she was greeted outside by a giant puppet of herself alongside dozens of body bags, symbolizing the victims of Germany's ongoing obstruction o...

We will never end the death and destruction of COVID-19 until we get real about vaccine equity. In a month of high-level meetings from the G7 to the World Health Assembly, we have seen a lot of rhetoric from the global north, and a lot of frustration and urgency from the global south, but still no substantial changes on how to get the world vaccinated. Vaccines offer an incredible opportunity for science to outpace the virus, but now we are seein...

Carbon dioxide, once emitted into the atmosphere, stays there for hundreds of years. When someone uses an offset to counteract emissions they need to make sure the offset they buy also lasts for centuries. For a company to claim that they are achieving net zero – balancing their emissions with an equivalent quantity of removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – it is essential that any offsets that they use are long-lasting, rather than temp...