Strengthening function as an international hub for providing strategic information on agriculture, forestry and fisheries, and mobilizing new research partnerships
On December 20, 2024 (Friday), six students from the Department of International Agricultural Development at Tokyo University of Agriculture visited JIRCAS as part of their seminar activities with the Rural Development Cooperation Research Laboratory. The visit began with an introduction to the research activities of JIRCAS, followed by lectures from several researchers and a tour of the facilities.
Archived videos of the JIRCAS International Symposium 2024 and Japan Award 2024 are available on the JIRCAS YouTube channel. If you missed it, please take a look.
As global warming progresses, the impacts of extreme heat are expected to grow even more, making it urgent to build effective early warning systems. According to an editorial in The Lancet Planetary Health, in the first two decades of the 21st century, the excess deaths from heat stroke were about 500,000 per year, of which about 250,000 were in Asia.
June 2025 was the third warmest June on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Western Europe as a whole experienced its hottest June on record, and the heatwave in mid- and late June 2025 led to "very high heat stress" conditions in a wide area, with temperatures exceeding 38°C, and "extreme heat stress" conditions in parts of Portugal, with temperatures reaching around 48°C.
On July 24, Sasakawa Africa Association in collaboration with IFPRI/ AFAAS will host a webinar, titled ‘Scaling Agricultural Extension in Africa amid Emerging Technologies and Global Aid Shifts’. Dr. Koide of JIRCAS will participate in the panel session of the event.
Our world faces overlapping environmental, health, security, and social crises. A recent paper by the Earth4All initiative, which uses systems modeling to address the issue of overshooting human pressures on the environment, has proposed five transitional pathways: energy, food and land systems, inequality, poverty, and gender equality.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) announced the world food price trend on July 4, with the average for June 2025 being 128.0 points, up 0.5% from May. The price indices for cereals and sugar fell, but this was outweighed by the increase in the price indices for dairy products, meat, and vegetable oils. Overall, the price index rose 5.8% from June 2024, but remained 20.1% lower than the peak recorded in March 2022.