climate change

Rising levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reduce the amount of nutrients in staple crops such as rice and wheat, say researchers at Harvard's public health school. As a consequence, more than 1 billion women and children would lose a large amount of their dietary iron intake and be at larger risk of anemia and other diseases.

In a study on food waste in the United States, the World Wildlife Fund found that on a specific set of farms in four states, 40 percent of tomatoes, 39 percent of peaches, 56 percent of romaine lettuce, and 2 percent of processing potatoes were left in the field rather than harvested.

The world’s top five meat and dairy companies — JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Dairy Farmers of America, and Fonterra — emit more greenhouse gases between them than ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP, according to a new report from the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy and GRAIN.

Two newly published studies highlight the risk that climate change could lead to the failure of corn crops around the world and reduce the nutritional content of vegetables, reports InsideClimate News. While looking at different subjects, the studies "reiterate the prospects of food shocks and malnutrition with unchecked global warming."

After losing 80 percent of its crop value to Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico's farmer brigades are not only helping their neighbors rebuild, but steering the island toward agro-ecology as a sustainable way to farm in the face of a changing climate, reports Audrea Lim in FERN's latest piece, published with The Nation. <strong>No paywall</strong>

When the seed bank in Tal Hadya, Syria, was threatened with destruction in the civil war that has engulfed that country, the seeds were smuggled out. Now, some those seeds — from wild wheat relatives in the Fertile Crescent — are being planted in the American Midwest in the hopes that they can protect the U.S. wheat crop from the pests and disease brought by a changing climate, according to FERN’s latest story, published with Yale Environment 360. <strong>No paywall</strong>

After a record-setting fire season in 2017, this year “is showing all signs of another historic year,” said interim Forest Service chief Vicki Christiansen on Thursday. “I will say above normal is our new normal.”

Cattle producers in Oklahoma lost $26 million in stock, fencing, and facilities to wildfires during April, estimated Derrell Peel, a livestock marketing specialist at Oklahoma State University.

For nearly a year, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt pushed for a public debate on the science of climate change that would be structured like the "red team-blue team" exercises of the military. White House chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, squashed the idea as ill-conceived, reports the New York Times.

As sea levels rise and the land subsides, America's first colonial farms—350-year-old tracts along Maryland's eastern shore—are being inundated with saltwater, threatening the corn and soybean crops while salt-tolerant plants grow six feet tall, reports FERN's latest story, published with The Atlantic.

With beef production accounting for nearly half of all land use and greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture, the World Resources Institute is touting what it calls a better burger.

Research by UC-Davis says that half of California’s vegetation is at risk of dying from global warming by the end of the century, reported Capital Public Radio.

There is a higher than usual risk of wildfire through April in the central and southern Plains, said Kansas State University scientists and the National Interagency Coordination Center, which studies wildfire risks.

Snowpack in parts of the Rocky Mountains is at record lows because of warmer than usual weather, “raising concerns about water supplies and economic damage,” says Inside Climate News.

In FERN’s latest story, published with Switchyard Magazine, reporter Robert Kunzig takes us to the upper Mississippi River Delta, where the idea of growing more fruits and vegetables — to ease the burden on California in the climate-change era — is taking root.