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by - Let's put it this way: If food loss and waste were its own country, it would be the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, exceeded only by China and the United States.
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Today, the United States Department of Agriculture and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced the country’s first-ever goal for reducing food waste.
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by Nancy Harris, Octavia Payne and Sarah Alix Mann - August 06, 2015With the world’s appetite for chocolate at an all-time high, producers are looking for new places to grow cacao—the raw ingredient in cocoa and chocolate. Some are turning to South America, where satellite images show one cacao plantation encroaching dramatically on the Amazon rainforest.
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by Nancy Harris, Octavia Payne and Sarah Alix Mann - August 06, 2015El apetito mundial por el chocolate está a un punto máximo sin precedentes, y los productores buscan nuevos lugares para cultivar cacao, la materia prima del chocolate y del cacao en polvo. Algunos productores han recurrido a Sudamérica, donde las imágenes satelitales resaltan a una plantación de cacao que está invadiendo la selva tropical amazónica.
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by Caroline Grace Vexler and Brian Lipinski - July 02, 2015Twenty-three percent of the food available in sub-Saharan Africa is lost or wasted. At the same time, one in every four people is undernourished.
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by Craig Hanson - May 28, 2015WRI responds to a critique of its working paper, Avoiding Bioenergy Competition for Food Crops and Land. The paper articulates reasons the world should avoid dedicating land to bioenergy production if it is to sustainably feed the global population in 2050.
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by Andrew Steer and Craig Hanson - January 29, 2015Biofuels and bioenergy take up finite land resources at the cost of food production and carbon storage and doesn’t guarantee carbon emissions cuts.
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by Tim Searchinger and Ralph Heimlich - January 2015What is the role of bioenergy in a sustainable food future? The answer must recognize the intense global competition for land, and that any dedicated use of land for bioenergy inherently comes at the cost of not using that land for food, feed, or sustained carbon storage.
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by Tim Searchinger - January 28, 2015A new WRI paper finds bioenergy can play a modest role using wastes and other niche fuelstocks, but recommends against dedicating land to produce bioenergy.
The lesson: do not grow food or grass crops for ethanol or diesel or cut down trees for electricity.
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by Manish Bapna and Kitty van der Heijden - January 23, 2015Between now and September 2015, when heads of state will gather for the UN General Assembly, we have a historic chance to set the world on a more sustainable path that will eradicate poverty and enhance prosperity for all.
Over the coming months, however, leaders must work together to set the world on the right course to realize this vision.
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by Tim Searchinger and Richard Waite - December 16, 2014A new WRI working paper finds that reducing flooding in rice paddies can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and can also help conserve water and boost yields.
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by Tim Searchinger, Tapan K. Adhya, Bruce Linquist, Reiner Wassmann and Xiaoyuan Yan - December 2014A sustainable food future will require reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture even as the world produces substantially more food. The production of rice, the staple crop for the majority of the world’s population, emits large quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
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August 19, 2014The solution to improving food security and resilience in Africa is no secret: all sectors need to work together to scale up climate-smart agriculture. What's needed now is political will to make that happen.
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by Tim Searchinger and Craig Hanson - July 28, 2014In an article originally published for Devex, Tim Searchinger and Craig Hanson discuss a new World Resources Report publication, which finds that using the modern advances of genetics—such as DNA mapping—offers a great opportunity to increase crop yields while also protecting the environment.
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by Andrew Steer and Monique Barbut, UN Convention to Combat Desertification - July 28, 2014Andrew Steer, CEO of WRI, and Monique Barbut of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification discuss the urgent need for a global commitment to restoring degraded land and how it may remedy deforestation, desertification and food scarcity.
The expected rise in world population to 9 billion by 2050, and the need for a 70 percent increase in food production from 2006 levels, makes the need for a solution particularly urgent. This challenge will be even more difficult in the face of a changing climate.
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by Tim Searchinger and Craig Hanson - July 22, 2014The world is on a path to need almost 70 percent more crops in 2050 than those it produced in 2006. To close that crop gap without large price increases or clearing more valuable forests and savannas, yields are going to have to grow 33 percent more in the next 44 years than they did in the last 44.
Using advances in molecular biology to breed better crops can sustainably secure more of the global food supply.
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by Tim Searchinger, Craig Hanson and Jean-Marc Lacape, Le Centre de Cooperation Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD) - July 2014The world needs to close a 69 percent gap between the crops produced in 2006 and the crops the world is on a course to need by 2050.
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by Katie Reytar, Craig Hanson and Norbert Henninger - June 2014Quantifiable indicators of the environmental sustainability of agriculture—by which we mean minimizing the environmental impacts of agriculture—are an important tool for helping move the world toward a sustainable food future.
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by Craig Hanson - June 25, 2014How does the world feed more than 9 billion people in the year 2050 in a manner that not only advances economic development but also reduces agriculture’s impact on the environment? How will we know if we’re on the right path?
WRI recently reviewed a number of existing indicators on the environmental sustainability of agriculture and identified gaps. Our analysis uncovers a need for improvements in indicators as well as the data underlying them—in particular, what we call the “3Ps, 5 themes, and 7 criteria.”