The JIRCAS 50th Anniversary International Symposium “The role of international collaboration in agricultural research to address challenges in the post-COVID-19 global food system” video has been released online.

A paper published in Nature Sustainability analyzed the vegetation trends across the planet’s driest areas using satellite imagery and found that vegetation regeneration is not commensurate with precipitation in developing countries in Asia and Africa. To avoid the negative impacts, it is important to take immediate mitigation measures through an understanding of the relationship between vegetation-rainfall sensitivity and associated drivers in tropical drylands.

Many farmers in developing countries that rely on rainfed agriculture are facing an increasing uncertainty of agricultural production due to the impact of climate change. Even in irrigated agriculture, proper management of water resources is also necessary. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA 2020) addressing the importance of proper governance for agricultural water resource management to ensure global food security and nutrition, and to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Agriculture is the largest contributor to land-use change which tends to increase the incidence of zoonotic diseases by increasing contact opportunities for wildlife, livestock and humans. On the other hand, is there any relationship between global warming itself and the outbreak of infectious diseases? A paper published in Science conducted a global meta-analysis of the thermal mismatch hypothesis about host-pathogen relationships. The resulting model showed that fungal disease risk increased in warm climates whereas the frequency of bacterial disease increased under warm abnormalities in cool climates.

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries around the world agreed to limit global warming to below 2°C and ideally, to well below 1.5°C. In November 2020, the World Resources Institute published a report summarizing the milestones of climate action to be achieved between 2030 and 2050. In the agricultural sector, it is necessary to pay attention to the difference in achievement between developed and developing countries, and to take different measures such as improving yields in developing countries and reducing consumption of animal-based foods in developed countries.

In November 2020, the United Nations reported that the COVID-19 pandemic had a tremendous impact on global food security and that hunger was rising again.

Only 10 years are left to reach the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, but the progress achieved so far in poverty reduction may be reversed due to the coronavirus pandemic. On November 16, 2020, the World Bank published the 2020 Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals to expand understanding of each of 17 goals using interactive storytelling and innovative data visualizations.

In November 2020, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published the “Food Outlook – Biannual Report on Global Food Markets”. The report includes a special feature entitled “Recent trends in food import bills and export earnings: the COVID-19 challenge” by FAO's Dr. Josef Schmidhuber who gave a keynote lecture on the impact of COVID-19 on the global food system at the JIRCAS 50th Anniversary Symposium held on November 10, 2020.

Understanding how the habitats of global species have changed in the past and how they will be affected by future climate change and land-use change scenarios due to agriculture and urbanization is necessary in developing effective conservation strategies. A paper published in Nature Communication shows that many species have lost their natural habitat areas due to long-term increase of land-use in tropical biodiversity hotspots.