Green Options

During a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting, the spokesman for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) said that the current global recession was simply ‘masking the next storm’.  Akinwumi Adesina reported that global food supplies were far from secure and that market speculation, climate change and crop diversity were all major threats in the near future. While global grain reserves had been replenished [...]

Forget the disaster movie scenarios of tsunamis, changes in the Earth’s magnetic core, the arrival of aliens or the mutation of some native species to giant size—our biggest risk is that we lose those small, aerodynamically impossible, stripy creatures so famous for their eccentric flight and delicious honey as well as their wax.

New research from the National Science Foundation suggests a warming Earth could mean a significant increase in voracious, plant-eating insects.

Scientists studying the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period about 55 million years ago when global carbon dioxide levels spiked rapidly, found that plant fossils from that time show noticeably more insect damage than plants from before or after the PETM. They [...]