Harvested News

So far, advocates and politicians have tended to focus on reducing fossil fuel consumption through technology and/or policy, such as a steep carbon tax, as climate solutions. These proposals are, of course, essential to reducing manmade carbon emissions—71 percent of which are generated by just 100 fossil fuel companies. For this reason, fossil-fuel–related emissions reductions rightly figure heavily in the national climate commitments of the…

The study examines 10 major climate-related issues facing farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and proposes site-specific CSA remedies. These include rotating rice fields with peanuts in Vietnam, manual blight control for cacao in Nicaragua, and planting drought-tolerant varieties of beans and maize alongside each other in Uganda. Where additional investment is required, initial rates of return on investment range from 17 percent…

The Annual Meetings took place in the wake of a new report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in early October, which warned that governments have just 12 years to reduce global greenhouse (GHG) emissions by 45per cent to avert irreversible global warming and limit global average temperature rise to 1.5°C. Countries’ current Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Climate Agreement (NDCs) put…

Global heating and ocean acidification have already severely bleached 16 to 33% of all warm-water reefs, but the remainder is vulnerable to even a fraction of a degree more warming, said David Obura, chair of the Coral Specialist Group in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “It will be like lots of lights blinking off,” he told the Observer. “It won’t happen…

Since 2010, new plant varieties have been developed in molecular laboratories using new plant breeding techniques (NPBTs), including tilling, protoplast fusion, cisgenesis, oligonucleotide techniques, CRISPR-Cas9 and Talen, with CRISPR-Cas9 being more prominent than the rest. With these methods, there is no transfer of a gene from a foreign species like there is with GMOs. On the contrary, new varieties are created by silencing the target…

In Bangladesh, low-lying and vulnerable to yearly flooding, farmers are shifting from raising chickens to raising ducks. Ducks can swim. In the Philippines, where half the mangrove forests have been lost to development, biologists are replanting the trees to recreate nature’s protective coastal shield against deadly typhoons. The gnarled tangle of mangrove roots slows the movement of tidal…