A ‘pitching’ challenge at ILRI helps young scientists explain what they do—and why it matters—to inquisitive friends, donors and policymakers Sometimes all it might take to prevent the spread of a contagious disease is to nail up a fence door left casually hanging open on its hinges. That’s one of the key lessons from Titus … Continue reading
Category Archives: Climate Change
Climate change already damaging children’s health, says new Lancet report
Climate change is already damaging the health of the world’s children and is set to shape the well-being of an entire generation unless the world meets Paris Agreement targets to limit warming to ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius, according to a major new report published in The Lancet. Continue reading
Livestock in context: A plea for intellectual rigor and collegial disagreement
Lawrence Haddad, the executive director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition and 2018 World Food Prize co-winner, gave two presentations at the International Tropical Agriculture Conference held 11-13 November in Brisbane, Australia. The first, titled Let them eat meat, was covered in an earlier blog post. His second presentation, titled Why animal source foods … Continue reading
Towards sustainable food system transformations in the Global South
The world is just eleven harvests away from 2030, but for hundreds of millions of people the goal of ending hunger set forth in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) remains as loftily elusive as ever. What can be done to put the developing world on the right track? Continue reading
The view from New York
Tad Friend’s largely laudatory profile of Pat Brown’s Impossible Burger enterprise (‘Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?’ September 30, 2019) raises important points about the environmental footprint of animal farming while passing along some questionable statistics. My concern is with its failure to recognize the essential contributions of sustainable livestock to development. Continue reading
FAO conference on global hunger to launch
More than 820 million people in the world are hungry today and an additional 1.3 billion suffer from moderate food insecurity, meaning they do not have regular access to nutritious food. Alarmingly, for the third straight year those numbers have risen, despite massive global commitments to reduce or end hunger and the harms, such as stunting and perilously low birthweight, associated with it. Continue reading
‘Drylands and Rangelands: Harnessing Change’ at Global Landscapes Forum in New York
The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is delighted to announce that a session devoted to drylands and rangelands is being incorporated in the agenda of a big event of the estimable Global Landscapes Forum, which is taking place all day tomorrow, in New York City. The theme of this forum, which led by ILRI’s sister CGIAR centre, the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), is ‘Restore the Earth: Opportunities and Partnerships’. Continue reading
Harnessing livestock innovations for greater economic good
The rising global demand for livestock-derived foods offers a wealth of new opportunities for transforming the livestock sector into one that is fair as well as sustainable, safe as well as profitable, humane as well as efficient. Continue reading
ILRI’s Jimmy Smith promotes ‘low-carbon’ and ‘climate-smart cows’ at the Africa Food Security Leadership Dialogue, in Rwanda
Jimmy Smith, director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), speaks at the Africa Food Security Leadership Dialogue today, which is being held in Kigali, Rwanda. Smith discussed some of the major research and development impacts that ILRI is making to mitigate the emissions from livestock, including a new methodology to determine, for the first time, the quantities of greenhouse gases emitted by African smallholder livestock systems. Continue reading
ILRI annual report goes online
ILRI has has published its annual report for 2018, and for the first time in its publication history, the report is primarily online. Continue reading