The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) released the World Food Price Trends on April 4. The value for March 2025 averaged 127.1 points, almost unchanged from February. Declines in the cereal and sugar price indexes offset increases in the meat and vegetable oil price indexes, and the dairy price index was stable. Overall, the price index was 6.9% higher than the same level a year ago, but 20.7% lower than the peak in March 2022.

Due to efforts to decarbonize the global economy, global anthropogenic emissions are diverging from the most extreme emission scenarios. Meanwhile, a paper published in Environmental Research Letters made a long-term prediction for the next 1,000 years and pointed out that taking into account climate, such as melting permafrost, and the carbon cycle feedback loop, including methane, could lead to a temperature rise significantly above the 2°C threshold.

Long-term records of the flowering season observed at the distribution limit of a species are useful for understanding the impact of climate change on the flowering season and for developing flowering prediction models. In particular, in temperate regions, the timing of cherry blossom flowering is said to be determined by the balance between exposure to cold (low temperature requirement) for releasing dormancy and the heat requirement for flower bud growth. On the other hand, if an abnormally warm winter like last year or weather conditions with large daily temperature fluctuations like this year become the norm, it may become more difficult to predict cherry blossom flowering.

On November 20, 2024, an academic research team, with Kobe University as the representative institution and the National Institute of Genetics and the Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences as co-research institutes, returned seeds of 49 Cambodian native rice varieties that had been preserved at the National Institute of Genetics to their home country of Cambodia. These seeds were collected before the Cambodian civil war and the spread of modern improved varieties, and many of them were thought to have been lost. It is expected that these valuable genetic resources will contribute to the restoration of genetic diversity and future rice breeding in Cambodia.

In January 2025, an open letter signed by 153 Nobel Prize and World Food Prize laureates called for a "moonshot" approach to food and nutrition security. It was recently announced that organizations from around the world, including JIRCAS, had signed the Laureate Letter.

A new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released on March 19th says that signs of anthropogenic climate change reached new heights in 2024, resulting in massive economic and social disruption due to extreme weather, and some of the impacts of climate change are expected to be irreversible for hundreds or even thousands of years.

2025 started with record-breaking high temperatures, and researchers are now actively discussing how to account for the rate of ongoing climate change. An editorial in Nature Geoscience highlighted the need to understand the complex interactions between greenhouse gas warming and short-term climate change, particularly the factors that caused changes in cloud cover.

Fermented foods are tightly interconnected with the climate and environmental conditions of their region. Fermentation is a technique for utilizing and processing agricultural, forestry, and fishery products, making them tasty and long-lasting while minimizing waste. The Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS) has been conducting joint research with the Institute of Food Research and Product Development (IFRPD), Kasetsart University, on traditional fermented foods in Asia. The database of fermented foods of Thailand has been released as one of the research outputs. It categorizes Thailand’s diverse fermented foods by raw material, such as fishery products, livestock products, fruits, vegetables, rice, and soybeans, and provides photos, explanations, and descriptions of production methods. This information has been available on the JIRCAS website. Content on the website was partially revised based on the latest information, updating photos, and including information on microorganisms along with reference literature.

Deforestation affects the local climate by changing the water balance, wind patterns, and the flow of heat and radiation between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere. A paper published in Nature analyzed seasonal rainfall changes in the Amazon after deforestation and showed that deforestation increases rainfall during the wet season but decreases it during the dry season when ecosystems need water the most, emphasizing the need to prevent the deforestation of forests that have a climate-regulating function.