On January 13, 2022, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other U.S. research organizations announced that 2021 was the sixth warmest year on record and that ocean heat content (OHC), which measures the amount of heat that accumulates on the surface of the ocean, was at an all-time high. The year 2021 is the warmest year on record under La Niña, and the past eight years have been the warmest consecutive years on record.

The CGIAR is an international organization established in 1971 for the purpose of improving the productivity and technological development of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries in developing countries, and 15 centers under its umbrella (as of 2020) function as independent research institutions. As a frontier of international agricultural research, these centers contribute to solving global food and environmental problems in line with various themes such as crops, livestock, forest, fisheries and natural resource management. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of CGIAR in 2021, we have compiled the scientific contributions and major achievements of Japanese and Japanese researchers in CGIAR institutions as a special issue of the Japan Agricultural Research Quarterly (JARQ), and all the papers have now been published on the JIRCAS website.

As we enter the year 2022, an editorial article in Nature cited the emergence of new coronavirus variant and the issue of vaccine disparities, as well as developments in international goals at the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as scientific events to watch in 2022. This year, we will continue to provide information on global issues related to agriculture, forestry and fisheries, such as climate change and food systems.

As reported in Japan recently, a major hamburger chain has decided to temporarily suspend the sale of some of its French fries products starting on the 24th of this month. Although Canada's potato production was bumper compared to the previous year, record rains that hit western Canada in November disrupted the transport infrastructure to the ports and slowed down exports. This is a symbolic event that shows that the global food system is extremely interconnected.

A few days ago, we introduced the key messages of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's report entitled “The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture - Systems at breaking point (SOLAW 2021)”. Here are some of the key facts about land and water from the report.