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306. Biological Nitrification Inhibition (BNI): Breakthrough in the Use of Nitrogen Fertilizer to Ensure Stable Food Supply and Reduce Environmental Impact

Modern agriculture  is faced with the major dilemma of minimizing the environmental damage caused by agriculture while ensuring an adequate food supply. Nitrogen fertilizer is essential for crop growth, and farmers have traditionally increased nitrogen fertilizer inputs to increase food production per unit of land and reduce deforestation caused by the expansion of farmland. At the same time, however, nitrogen fertilizer has become the major cause of greenhouse gas emissions lately and groundwater pollution. Retaining nitrogen in the soil in ammonium form could be the decisive factor in solving the dilemma of increased food production without environmental pollution. The “Opinion” of JIRCAS and Princeton University scientists on these debates was published on June 1 issue (vol. 118 no. 22) of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), one of the prestigious journals. JIRCAS and Princeton University had held a press release about this article.

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305. World Milk Day

June 1st is “World Milk Day”. It was established in 2001 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to raise awareness on the importance of milk and to celebrate the dairy industry. Milk is an important daily food in people's diet as it is a source of high quality protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals.
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304. Need for Investment in Nature-Based Solutions to Avert Planetary Crisis

On May 27, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released the report “State of Finance for Nature”. In order to combat the interconnected crises of climate, biodiversity and land degradation, the report estimates that there is a need to invest a total of USD 8.1 trillion in nature-based solutions between now and 2050. The current investment is USD 13.3 trillion per year, equivalent to 0.1% of global GDP, leaving a gap of USD 4.1 trillion in the amount needed by 2050. The report is calling for a three-fold increase in annual investment by 2030 and a four-fold increase by 2050.
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303. Likelihood of Temporarily Reaching 1.5°C Rise in Temperature Within 5 Years

On May 27, 2021, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released the Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, a global forecast conducted with the UK Met Office and other collaborating organizations, showing a high probability of temporarily reaching the lower limit of the Paris Agreement's temperature rise control target of 1.5°C since industrialization.

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302. United Nations: World Economic Situation and Prospects as of Mid-2021

In May 2021, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs released a report on the global economic situation and prospects as of mid-2021. According to the report, the global economic outlook has improved in recent years, driven by a robust economic recovery supported by accelerated vaccination and fiscal and financial support measures in the two largest economies, China and the United States, but widening economic and vaccination gaps with developing countries are overshadowing the achievement of global economic growth rates in 2021. However, widening economic and vaccination disparities with developing countries and other areas are casting a shadow on achieving global growth rates in 2021.
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301. Global Report on Food Crisis: 155 million people are acutely food insecure

The Global Network Against Food Crises (GNAFC) released its annual report Global Report on Food Crises 2021 this month. According to the report, at least 155 million people were acutely food insecure last year due to conflicts, economic shocks including COVID-19, and extreme weather events.
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300. The Anthropocene Perspective

This is the 300th article in this Pick Up series. In this article, we would like to introduce a paper that summarizes the concept of the Anthropocene, which has become a common topic of discussion in the food system. The concept was first introduced in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, who argued that human impact on the earth was sufficient to create a new geological era. Today, in the earth sciences, the Anthropocene is commonly associated with the "Great Acceleration" of the mid-20th century and 1950s, but in the arts and humanities, it seems to be interpreted in a broader sense.
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299. Recent Topics on Global Temperature Rise and Icebergs

A video released this month by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shows that temperatures on the Earth's surface have risen since 1950, showing a trend of unusually hot days and less frequent cold days. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, it was confirmed that one of the largest icebergs, A-76, which is 40 times the size of Paris, has begun to drift.

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298. International Biodiversity Day 2021 - We’re Part of the Solution -

The slogan for the celebration of International Biodiversity Day 2021 is "We're part of the solution #ForNature", and we would like to share our thoughts on biodiversity by summarizing the Pick Up articles on biodiversity that we have covered so far.

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297. Joint Report on Child Malnutrition

The UNICEF, World Health Organization (WHO) and World Bank released this month the 2021 edition of the joint global and regional estimates of malnutrition among children under 5 years of age. The report shows that the number of children with stunting has been declining rapidly in recent years, but the rate of decline needs to accelerate to reach the 2030 target. The estimates do not take into account the impact of COVID-19 which is expected to exacerbate all forms of malnutrition in the future.

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296. Impact of Climate Change on Safe Climatic Space for Agriculture

A paper published in One Earth in May 2021 asserts that under the worst-case climate change scenario, regions equivalent to one-third of the world's food production could fall outside the safe climatic space suitable for agriculture. The regions projected to be most vulnerable are those with inherently low resilience to climate change, such as South and Southeast Asia and the Sudan Sahel zone in Africa.

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295. International Fascination of Plants Day

The European Plant Science Organisation (EPSO) proposed this day in the autumn of 2011 as a day for everyone across the world to think about the importance of plants, and since 2012, has designated May 18th every year as international “Fascination of Plants Day”.
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294. Double Pyramid of Food System: Healthier Food is Better for the Planet

The Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition (a think tank of the Barilla Group, an Italian company famous for pasta) has devised a "double pyramid" of food systems. By placing the health and climate pyramids side-by-side, the model aims to show that healthier foods are similar to foods with a lower environmental impact, thereby reducing the impact of food choices on the environment and climate change.

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293. Publication of the JIRCAS-FFTC International Rice Blast Workshop Proceedings

The Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences (JIRCAS) and the Asia-Pacific Food and Fertilizer Technology Center for the Asian and Pacific Region (FFTC) jointly organized the “International Workshop: Applicable Solutions Against Rice Blast in Asia” on September 18, 2020. The workshop was attended by 116 participants from Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh, Malaysia, India and other countries. The proceedings of the workshop have now been published as a collection of papers presented during the workshop
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292. Benefits and Costs of Mitigating Methane Emissions to Prevent Global Warming

According to the Global Methane Assessment: Benefits and Costs of Mitigating Methane Emissions, a report published by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in May 2021, methane emissions from human activities could be reduced by up to 45% over 10 years, thus limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5˚C in line with the goal of the Paris Climate Agreement.
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291. Limitations of Technological Innovations in Solving the Food Crisis

In April 2021, an editorial in Nature Food pointed out the limitations of approaches that rely solely on technological innovations in achieving food security and sustainability, and discussed the need for traditional knowledge and behavioral change to solve the current food crisis.


 
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290. Global Food Policy Report: Food System Transformation After COVID-19

In April, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) published the 2021 Global food policy report: Transforming food systems after COVID-19. In this report, food policy experts provide data-based evidence and policy recommendations for healthy, resilient, efficient, sustainable, and inclusive food system transformation by examining the impact of the pandemic and policy responses, particularly on the poor and vulnerable.
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289. Announcement of the New U.S. Climate Normals

With the new coronary pandemic affecting every aspect of our lives, the term "new normal" has become a popular topic in the news. In the meteorology, the new normal refers to a data set that is updated every 10 years based weather factors such as average temperature and rainfall over the past 30 years. On May 4, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its 30-year Climate Normals data set for the period 1991-2020, reporting warmer temperatures and increased rainfall across the U.S., but with large spatial and seasonal differences.
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288. Resource Security and Poverty Eradication

A paper published in Nature Sustainability in April 2021 discussed the importance of resource security in poverty eradication. According to this study, human demand for natural resources increasingly outstrips the speed of the Earth's biological recovery. As a result, the capacity of ecosystems to regenerate biomass has become a material constraint for human economies. The analysis showed that as of 2017, almost 72% of the world's population lived in countries where the supply of biological resources does not meet demand, and low-income countries were trapped in a situation called an ‘ecological poverty trap’.

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287. Climate Change Summit Momentum

At the Climate Change Summit hosted by the Biden administration in late April 2021, a number of countries updated their greenhouse gas reduction targets. According to the Climate Action Tracker, which is run by a group of researchers who estimate the effect of limiting temperature rise based on countries' greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, taking into account recent commitments, temperature rise by the end of the 21st century could be limited to 2.4°C. However, the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C goal will require further greenhouse gas emission reductions.