Between the world's increasing population and its growing food consumption as poverty declines, experts predict we will need 70-100% more food by 2050.
How we might be able to produce that food is the subject of a report published in the journal Science called “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People.”
The paper, written by Britain's chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, and nine other experts, does not offer specific recommendations, though the authors are working on those. They note that climate change and its impact on agriculture, soil and water resources will further complicate the task of feeding a world population estimated to hit 9 billion by 2050.
The small island nations and members of the Africa Group said today that they would not agree to an outcome in Copenhagen that fails to limit the average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters have long said they will not budge an inch closer than a limit of 2 degrees Celsius. The carbon cuts they've put on the table so far wouldn't get them close to even that goal.
The hallways at the international climate summit at Copenhagen are crawling with big private investors who are ready to open their wallets to solve the climate crisis.
And there are plenty of folks trying to get their attention — among those, 13-year-old Litha Maqungo of Capetown, South Africa.
"Climate change will bring too much pain and suffering with droughts famines and floods," Litha, speaking in a slow powerful voice, told a group of 100 investors at a dinner last week.
Certainty is a luxury. When you’re rich, you can insure anything that isn’t certain. But when you’re poor and growing crops in Malawi, herding sheep in Mongolia, or sowing rice in Bangladesh, you’re at the mercy of the weather, a fickle force made even more so by climate change.
The governments of developing countries are already partly reliant on microfinance schemes to alleviate poverty. Now, several groups are calling for international support for a different type of microfinance — microinsurance — to help mitigate the risks posed by severe and abnormal weather patterns brought on by global warming.
Consider a farmer in Malawi who takes out a loan to buy seed for groundnuts, a common financial scenario among poor farmers in the region.
For much of the last 200 years, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide hovered around 275 parts per million. In this century, with atmospheric carbon dioxide nearing 390 ppm, and climbing annually by about 2.5 ppm, we are already beyond what many scientists see as a critical threshold in climate change.
Farmers around the world are already feeling the impact.
In India, the worst monsoon season since 1972 threatens the 60 percent of cropland that relies on rain; many fields weren’t even planted this year. In China, a drought that started in the north in the spring (leading some to suggest moving the capital, Beijing) now extends to the central and southern portions of the nation, and is being touted as the worst in 40 years.
The same situation is repeating itself in the Middle East, with serious impacts in Iraq, parts of Turkey, Jordan and Syria as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run dry. The Aral Sea, tapped to grow Russian cotton in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, has lost 80 percent of its water since 2006.
In Africa, nations like Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya are experiencing severe drought. Where once the rains failed every nine or 10 years, they now fail every two to three years. In Kenya’s Kamba region, where many crops have withered, residents live on a meagre government dole and try to dig wells, but a subsurface rock layer stymies them. Dying livestock add to the turmoil, forcing cattle raids within and across borders that further threaten the stability of governments and facilitate the work of rebels, who leave behind their own trail of dead and dying.
Coal-addicted South Africa may be on the verge of going solar. More than that, the nation could become the springboard for a solar rise in the whole sun-rich region.
On Oct. 9, the government of South Africa and the Clinton Climate Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding to develop the nation's first "solar park." The project could add up to 5,000 MW of grid-connected solar to South Africa's energy mix, which currently stands at close to zero.
The first step is a feasibility study to size up the commercial potential of the project — the solar radiation, land availability, transmission access and cost, water, job creation, among other things.
Of course, pledging to make a business plan is not the same as pledging to break ground — but it's a start. And it comes amid other signs that South Africa is getting serious about its solar future.
In Kenya, persistent drought is threatening food security for some 31.5 million people, and more than one million face imminent starvation.
Kenya’s government, looking for about $525 million in supplemental food funds from an already inflation-impacted budget, faces the prospect of feeding its people at the expense of a number of other projects that could improve food security for the future.
It’s a perilous tradeoff — survival now at the expense of future survival.
At the same time, the Kenya Food Security Steering Group (KFSSG) reports that the 2009 maize crop will be 28 percent below normal. This is extraordinarily bad news because maize is the staple food crop for 96 percent of Kenya’s people.
And therein lies the problem, says Professor Mary Abukutsa-Onyango, a horticultural scientist, teacher and researcher with Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture & Technology in Nairobi.
Do you recycle your cell phones? It's a great practice for insuring that toxic materials in those old phones don't make their way into the environment. But what about the other side of the cell phone lifecycle? Do you know where the materials come from?
It turns out that many of the minerals in that phone have an ugly story behind them, similar to that of blood diamonds.
TakePart.com, a project of Participant Media, produced the PSA above as part of a larger campaign to educate the public about the role "conflict minerals" play in funding armed groups fighting in the Eastern Congo.
The conflict in eastern Congo, the deadliest in the world since World War II, is being fueled by a multi-million dollar trade in minerals that go into our electronic products from cell phones to digital cameras.
Over five million people have died as a result of the war, and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped in eastern Congo over the past decade. The armed groups that are perpetuating the violence generate an estimated $144 million each year by trading in four main minerals, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, all of which make our consumer electronics products function properly.
As climate change alters the African landscape, making some parts of the continent unsuitable for agriculture, raising camels could supplant crops and other livestock in the hardest hit areas, a study from the International Livestock Research Institute suggests.
Environmental scientist Philip K. Thornton is serious about that recommendation.
In parts of the arid and semi-arid regions of West, East and southern Africa, increasingly inadequate rainfall already causes crops to fail one out of every six years – a rate that is increasing as global warming takes its toll.
By 2050, between 500,000 and 1 million square kilometers of Africa could fall below the crop threshold of 90 reliable of days of moisture, according to a series of computer models that take into account potential impacts from climate change.
Where impacts are most severe, switching from cropping to herding may be the only salvation.
Thornton’s research suggests that raising drought-hardy camels could be a viable option for some 20 million to 35 million people living in scattered areas about the size of Egypt that will likely become so arid by 2050 that raising food will be virtually impossible. It could also be more lucrative than people realize.
The most ambitious solar power plan ever conceived may be coming into some serious cash.
A group of 20 German firms is forming a consortium this July to begin raising $555 billion for the much-discussed Afro-European solar research project known as Desertec, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed this week.
Desertec seeks to transform Saharan Africa into a solar hub for Europe by constructing a supergrid of concentrating solar thermal plants (CSP) on 6,500 square miles of North African desert. They claim their scheme could eventually meet much of the continent's electricity needs.
Half a trillion dollars in funding would certainly be a tremendous start in that direction. In fact, that kind of financing would be enough to power 15 percent of the continent by 2050.
Talk about a boost for Big Solar.
The news of the colossal cash infusion is grabbing global headlines. And it's no wonder. The firms involved are some of the heaviest hitters in Europe: insurance giant Munich Re, German engineering leader Siemens, Deutsche Bank, energy companies RWE and E.on, among others.
