Sustainability & Climate Change
Food production needs are expected to roughly double over the next 35 years as the world population grows and people in under developed countries become more affluent and demand more calories. Healthy ecosystems are vital to the survival of all organisms. How can we grow crops without harming the environment? How can we balance technology and global food security? What is the right balance of organic and conventional farming? What role can genetics and biotechnology play without compromising the needs of tomorrow?
Below is the complete archive of related articles sorted by date.
GMO houseplant traps carcinogenic chemicals that home air filters miss
[M]ost of us like to keep the air in our homes as clean as possible and we often go to ...
Bacon—made of mushrooms? New plant-based meat on the horizon
Eben Bayer, cofounder and CEO of Ecovative, built his company making things out of mycelium, the root structure of a mushroom. He's ...
Can ‘speed breeding’ help Europe develop disease-resistant crops without gene editing?
Technology first used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to grow plants in space is fast-tracking improvements in a ...
M.S. Swaminathan, ‘father of India’s Green Revolution,’ says he’s not opposed to GMO crops
An iconic Indian agricultural scientist is distancing himself from a recent editorial he co-authored that is critical of genetically modified ...
‘Smart farming’: Researchers aim to turn bees into ‘tiny drones’ that monitor plant health
[A] research team at the University of Washington has found a way to make bumblebees act like tiny drones. The ...
While AquaBounty’s GMO salmon remains blocked in US, Argentina exempts the company’s sustainable gene-edited tilapia from regulation
Transgenic salmon producer AquaBounty and its majority owner, Intrexon, [December 18] announced that their jointly developed gene-edited line of tilapia, ...
Video: Kenya to begin planting yield-boosting GMO cotton by spring 2020
Cotton farmers in Kenya are set to start planting genetically modified cotton by May 2020, a year later than expected, ...
Adoption of GMO cowpea, rice could offer substantial boost to Ghana’s farmers and consumers, study says
Cowpea is the most widely produced grain legume in Ghana and a key food security crop. In northern Ghana, where ...
Organic farming and dairy production much worse for the environment—as much as 70% greater release of greenhouse gases—concludes ‘ground-breaking’ Swedish study
Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food .... This is the finding of a new ...
Can AI-enhanced plant breeding deliver high yielding non-GMO crops?
Hi Fidelity Genetics (HFG), a company that uses sensors, data science, and statistical genetics to create non-genetically modified crops, just ...
Biotech could help Mexico’s bean farmers cope with climate change
Beans are the most important grain legume in human diets .... Indeed, bean production is central to the food security ...
Can GMO agave transform the tequila industry?
Black frost is a meteorological phenomenon marked by temperatures that drop below 0 ° C for up to five hours ...
Organic vs conventional farming: Which is worse for Earth’s climate?
Organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed food, due to the greater areas of land required ...
Why are farmers so eager to grow GMO crops?
Genetically modified (GM) crops are produced using new genetic engineering methods. Since their development slightly over 20 years ago, they ...
High-quality hybrid seeds could help feed Africa’s growing population
Africa’s demand for food will more than double by 2050, driven by population growth and rapid urbanization. A growing population ...
Evaluating claims GMOs and modern agriculture have led to a 75% drop in crop diversity
The conventional wisdom is wrong: crop diversity is not collapsing. Our changing diets indicate there are reasons for both concern ...
Revolutionary hybrid plant clones could cut costs for farmers
Plant biologists at the University of California, Davis, have discovered a way to make crop plants replicate through seeds as clones ...
Do GMO American chestnut trees pose a threat to the environment? Two new studies say no
Two new studies on the environmental impact of transgenic American chestnut trees provide evidence that the trees have no harmful ...
Can we feed a growing world population without using yield-boosting technologies?
The production of food has environmental impacts, there is no way around this .... Nature is ruthless and weeds will ...
Is climate change ‘robbing’ our food of nutrients?
Is it possible to starve yourself of nutrients while simultaneously gaining weight? .... According to a growing body of research, ...
Using biotech to turn plants into ‘antifungal factories’ could protect against disease
Researchers [at the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) in Spain] have developed a biotechnological tool to produce .... antifungal ...
GMO bacteria could help resolve Africa’s plastic pollution ‘menace’
African scientists are calling for investments in the application of biotechnology to deal with the world’s plastic pollution problem. They ...
Lab-grown meat is coming soon—but will anyone eat it?
As 2018 wraps up, the average American is poised to have eaten 222 pounds of beef over the course of ...
Viewpoint: Intensive agriculture is the only way to sustainably feed the world
[In December], the World Resources Institute (WRI) released a comprehensive study embracing agricultural intensification as the only way to simultaneously close what ...
Podcast: Jon Entine, Kevin Folta, Perry Hackett on how gene editing could dampen the partisan GMO divide
How do you win over people who view crop biotechnology and corporate influence as threats? One answer may be gene ...
Land sparing or land sharing: How do we feed the world while protecting the environment?
It is one of the biggest questions in conservation: Should we be sharing our landscapes with nature by reviving small ...
Edible vaccine may protect honey bees from deadly microbial infections
A growing number of honey bees die each year due to pesticides, vanishing habitats, poor nutrition and climate change, with ...
