The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has been releasing Frontiers reports since 2016 that focus on emerging environmental challenges. In Frontiers 2022: Noise, Blazes and Mismatches, published on February 17, 2022, the following issues are addressed: the long-term physical and mental health impacts of urban noise pollution, the increasing frequency of wildfires and forest fires and the shifting rhythm of nature due to climate change. Today, we will focus on the mismatch between the life cycle patterns of plants and animals and the seasons.

Sugarcane is an important crop for food and energy production in the world, producing about 80% of the world's sugar and 40% of the world's bioethanol. In Japan, it is cultivated as a main crop in the Nansei Islands and plays an important role in maintaining domestic self-sufficiency in sugar and the social and economic life of the island region. JIRCAS, in collaboration with the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) has bred Japan's first sugar cane variety for sugar production, "Harunogi", using interspecific hybridization with wild sugarcane varieties. The distribution of stalks for seeds to farmers in the Kumage and Amami regions of Kagoshima Prefecture has began in February 2022, with the aim of spreading this new variety.

For people around the world, seafood resources are essential to a healthy diet and are of vital cultural importance. Small-scale fisheries and aquaculture workers play a major role in providing fish, molluscs, crustaceans and aquatic plants. The United Nations has designated 2022 as the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture (IYAFA 2022) to provide an opportunity to highlight the importance of small-scale artisanal fisheries and aquaculture for our food systems, livelihoods, culture and the environment.

The 8th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD8) will be held in August 2022 in Tunisia. Agriculture, as a major industry, is essential for Africa's development and is also very important from the perspective of food security. This article introduces the key messages of the FAO report "Africa - Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2021" published last year and shares the current situation.

Today, one out of every ten people in the world suffers from hunger, while diseases associated with obesity and overweight have become widespread due to the spread of diets rich in animal products and fats. The food system that supports these dietary habits lacks agricultural diversity and is considered to be the biggest cause of biodiversity loss, and is also involved in climate change through emissions equivalent to one third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. In recent years, a growing global awareness of the need to rethink our food system has led to the visualization of the health, environmental, and economic costs of food, with the aim of encouraging behavioral change and innovation toward healthier diets for the planet and humanity.

In Africa and other developing regions, it is known that environmental factors such as low soil fertility and drought, as well as biological factors such as pests and diseases, stress the growth and development of plants and prevent the full potential of agriculture from being realized. In order to develop technologies for stable agricultural production under adverse environment and climate change, we published a review in JARQ summarizing three projects conducted at JIRCAS from FY2016-2020.

The FAO has released "Crops and climate change impact briefs". It includes a chapter on cowpea, which describes sustainable and resilient cowpea production systems through climate-smart agriculture (CSA) and approaches to climate change adaptation and mitigation. In addition, it also discusses the contribution of these practices to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

JIRCAS, in collaboration with universities and research institutes in China, has long been collecting and analyzing valuable information for the formation of a healthy industrial market for rice, the most important grain for China. The result of the joint research, an academic book “High-quality Rice - An empirical analysis of Chinese Rice in the consumption upgrade era”, has now been published locally in Chinese.

On February 3, 2022, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) announced that that the Food Price Index averaged 135.7 points in January, and increased by 1.5 points (1.1%) compared to December 2021. The increase appears to reflect a price spike mainly due to supply constraints in major vegetable oil producing countries.