An archived video of the "Symposium with Dr. Cary Fowler, 2024 World Food Prize Laureate – Dr. Fowler’s Journey to Preserve Genetic Diversity and New Mission for Africa’s Adapted Crops and Soils," held on Friday, October 11, has been released.

The 2024 edition of the United Nations World Water Development Report highlights how developing and maintaining water security and equitable access to water services, especially access to innovations that allow efficient use of water, is essential to ensuring peace and prosperity for all.

In order to maintain food security in the face of climate change, it is necessary to accelerate the development of resilient crops. A review article published in 2021 emphasized the need to improve the accuracy of trait selection using the latest technologies, strengthen investment in research to elucidate the mechanism of stress tolerance in underutilized crops, and improve information on genetic diversity in order to accelerate resilient crop breeding. On November 22, 2024, the JIRCAS International Symposium 2024 will discuss the role of resilient genetic resources in the age of global boiling.

In Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, Dr. Rockström, a proponent of the planetary boundaries concept, reviewed the genealogy of Earth system science that led to the development of the Planetary Boundaries concept into various scientific disciplines.

We will hold a seminar to deepen our understanding of the future of global food supply and demand by inviting two government officials and researchers who have prepared med- to long-term global food supply and demand forecasts with a special focus on the U.S. agricultural commodity markets by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) released its World Food Price Trends on November 8. The value in October 2024 averaged 127.4 points, up 2% from September and the highest level since April 2023. All commodity price indicators, except for the meat indicator, increased, and the increase in oil prices reached 7.3%. This figure was 5.5% higher than last year, but 20.5% lower than the all-time high in March 2022.

The 29th Conference of the Parties (COP29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11 to 22, 2024. One of the initiatives expected to be discussed at COP29 is Methane Reduction from Organic Waste.

We are hosting an international symposium featuring Dr. Seth Meyer, Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Dr. Keith Wiebe, Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The symposium will introduce the progress of the "Study on Prediction Models for Ultra-Long-term Global Food Supply and Demand Forecasts" initiated by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) in FY2022, and will include a panel discussion to debate global food security issues.

Biodiversity, especially the diversity of crop genetic resources, is crucial to maintaining food security in an era of accelerating climate change and environmental crises. A paper published in the journal Science in October discusses the importance of preserving and harnessing genetic diversity in resilient food systems.