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.

JIRCAS holds the International Symposium 2020 on "The role of international collaboration in agricultural research to address the challenges in the post-COVID-19 global food system” in a webinar format today, November 10th (Tue) from 15:00 to 17:30 Japan time.

A report of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Workshop on Biodiversity and Pandemics stated that pandemics have their origins in diverse microbes carried by animal reservoirs, but their emergence is entirely driven by human activities. The report also pointed out that the root cause of a pandemic is the same as the global environmental changes that cause biodiversity loss and climate change, such as land-use change, agricultural expansion and intensification, and wildlife trade and consumption.

It's been almost a year since the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was first confirmed in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019. Since then, the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has rapidly spread around the world due to movement of people and economic activities. The impact of the COVID-19 health and economic crisis has swept the globe, particularly impacting vulnerable societies with limited access to the social insurance system, rapidly widening poverty and inequality, and the likelihood of a hunger pandemic has also become a serious concern. With the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns about global food security have increased, and the global food system has come to the fore as a channel of transmission. In discussing the impact of COVID-19 on the food system, distribution, consumption and production are of particular interest. On November 10, 2020, JIRCAS will hold a symposium on the theme of COVID-19 and the global food system to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its founding. The registration deadline is on November 4th until 5:00 PM. Please register and join us.