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For the first time ever, food and agriculture took center stage at the annual United Nations climate conference in 2023.
More than 130 countries signed a declaration on Dec. 1, committing to make their food systems – everything from production to consumption – a focal point in national strategies to address climate change.
The declaration is thin on concrete actions to adapt to climate change and reduce emissions, but it draws attention to a crucial issue.
The global food supply is increasingly facing disruptions from extreme heat and storms. It is also a major contributor to climate change, responsible for one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. This tension is why agriculture innovation is increasingly being elevated in international climate discussions.
At present, agriculture provides enough food for the world’s 8 billion people, although many do not have adequate access. But to feed a global population of 10 billion in 2050, croplands would need to expand by 660,000 to 1.2 million square miles (171 million to 301 million hectare) relative to 2010. That would lead to more deforestation, which contributes to climate change. Further, some practices widely relied on to produce sufficient food, such as using synthetic fertilizers, also contribute to climate change.
Simply eliminating deforestation and these practices without alternative solutions would decrease the world’s food supply and farmers’ incomes. Fortunately, innovations are emerging that can help.
In a new report, the Innovation Commission for Climate Change, Food Security and Agriculture, founded by Nobel-winning economist Michael Kremer, identifies seven priority areas for innovation that can help ensure sufficient food production, minimize greenhouse gas emissions and be scaled up to reach hundreds of millions of people.
I’m an agriculture economist and executive director for the commission. Three innovations in particular stand out for their ability to scale up quickly and pay off economically.
Accurate, accessible weather forecasts
With extreme weather leaving crops increasingly vulnerable and farmers struggling to adapt, accurate weather forecasts are crucial. Farmers need to know what to expect, both in the days ahead and farther out, to make strategic decisions about planting, irrigating, fertilizing and harvesting.
Yet access to accurate, detailed forecasts is rare for farmers in many low- and middle-income countries.
Our assessment shows that investing in technology to collect data and make forecasts widely available – such as by radio, text message or WhatsApp – can pay off many times over for economies.
For example, accurate state-level forecasts of seasonal monsoon rainfall totals would help Indian farmers optimize sowing and planting times, providing an estimated US$3 billion in benefits over five years – at a cost of around $5 million.
If farmers in Benin received accurate forecasts by text message, we estimate that they could save each farmer $110 to $356 per year, a large amount in that country.
More sharing of information among neighboring countries, using platforms like the World Meteorological Organization’s Climate Services Information System, could also improve forecasts.
Microbial fertilizers
Another innovation priority involves expanding the use of microbial fertilizers.
Nitrogen fertilizer is widely used to increase crop yields, but it is typically made from natural gas and is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Microbial fertilizers use bacteria to help plants and soil absorb the nutrients they need, thereby reducing the amount of nitrogen fertilizer needed.
Studies have found that microbial fertilizers could increase legume yields by 10% to 30% in healthy soil and generate billions of dollars in benefits. Other microbial fertilizers work with corn, and scientists are working on more advancements.
Soybean farmers in Brazil have been using a rhizobia-based microbial fertilizer for decades to improve their yields and cut synthetic fertilizer costs. But this technique is not as widely known elsewhere. Scaling it up will require funding to expand testing to more countries, but it has great potential payoff for farmers, soil health and the climate.
Reducing methane from livestock
A third innovation priority is livestock, the source of roughly two-thirds of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. With demand for beef projected to rise 80% by 2050 as low- and middle-income countries grow wealthier, reducing those emissions is essential.
Several innovative methods for reducing livestock methane emissions target enteric fermentation, which leads to methane belches.
Adding algae, seaweed, lipids, tannins or certain synthetic compounds to cattle feed can change the chemical reactions that generate methane during digestion. Studies have found some techniques have the potential to reduce methane emissions by a quarter to nearly 100 percent. When cattle produce less methane, they also waste less energy, which can go into growth and milk production, providing a boost for farmers.
The method is still expensive, but further development and private investment could help scale it up and lower the cost.
Gene editing, either of livestock or the microorganisms in their stomachs, could also someday hold potential.
Scaling up agriculture innovation
The Innovation Commission also identified four other priorities for innovation:
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Helping farmers and communities implement better rainwater harvesting.
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Lowering the cost of digital agriculture that can help farmers use irrigation, fertilizer and pesticides most efficiently.
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Encouraging production of alternative proteins to reduce demand for livestock.
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Providing insurance and other social protections to help farmers recover from extreme weather events.
While promising agricultural innovations exist, commercial incentives to develop and scale them up have fallen short, leading to underinvestment, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.
However, innovation funding has a track record of generating very high social rates of return. This creates an opportunity for public and philanthropic investment in developing and deploying innovations at a scale to reach hundreds of millions of people. Of course, to be effective, any potential innovation must be consistent with – and driven by – national strategies and planned in conjunction with the government, the private sector and civil society.
Two decades ago, global leaders, frustrated that lifesaving vaccines were not reaching hundreds of millions of people who needed them, created Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance. They invested billions of dollars to scale up these innovations, helped to immunize over 1 billion children and halved child mortality in 78 lower-income countries.
This year, officials at COP28 are aiming for a similar global response to climate change, food security and agriculture.
Paul Winters, Professor of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
As a new storm front moves in, Lake County is coming off of several days of mild rainfall.
Based on National Weather Service observation stations, rainfall totals in inches for the 72-hour period ending at 11:30 p.m. Saturday are as follows:
— High Glade Lookout (Upper Lake): 1.02.
— Indian Valley Reservoir: 0.10.
— Kelseyville: 0.22.
— Lake Pillsbury: 0.80.
— Lower Lake: 0.07.
— Lyons Valley: 0.54.
— Middletown: 0.05.
— Nice: 0.36.
— Whispering Pines: 0.48.
The forecast for the new week expects rain every day, with temperatures ranging from the mid-50s during the day to the high 30s at night.
In Lake County, rainfall totals are expected to reach as much as an inch for Saturday and Sunday combined.
The storm front bringing the rain to Lake County is bringing far heavier amounts to Humboldt and Del Norte counties, where urban and small stream flooding advisories were issued for Saturday evening.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Akita, Chihuahua, German shepherd, hound, Labrador retriever, pit bull and shepherd.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
Those dogs and the others shown on this page at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
The shelter is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
Most birds that flit through dense, leafy forests have a strategy for maneuvering through tight windows in the vegetation — they bend their wings at the wrist or elbow and barrel through.
But hummingbirds can't bend their wing bones during flight, so how do they transit the gaps between leaves and tangled branches?
A study published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology shows that hummingbirds have evolved their own unique strategies — two of them, in fact. These strategies have not been reported before, likely because hummers maneuver too quickly for the human eye to see.
For slit-like gaps too narrow to accommodate their wingspan, they scooch sideways through the slit, flapping their wings continually so as not to lose height.
For smaller holes — or if the birds are already familiar with what awaits them on the other side — they tuck their wings and coast through, resuming flapping once clear.
"For us, going into the experiments, the tuck and glide would have been the default. How else could they get through?" said Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior author of the paper. "This concept of sideways motion with a total mix-up of the wing kinematics is quite amazing — it's a novel and unexpected method of aperture transit. They're changing the amplitude of the wing beats so that they're not dropping vertically when they do the sideways scooch."
Using the slower sideways scooch technique may allow birds to better assess upcoming obstacles and voids, thereby reducing the likelihood of collisions.
"Learning more about how animals negotiate obstacles and other 'building-blocks' of the environment, such as wind gusts or turbulent regions, can improve our overall understanding of animal locomotion in complex environments," noted first author Marc Badger, who obtained his Ph..D from UC Berkeley in 2016. "We still don't know very much about how flight through clutter might be limited by geometric, aerodynamic, sensory, metabolic or structural processes. Even behavioral limitations could arise from longer-term effects, such as wear and tear on the body, as hinted at by the shift in aperture negotiation technique we observed in our study."
Understanding the strategies that birds use to maneuver through a cluttered environment may eventually help engineers design drones that better navigate complex environments, he noted.
"Current remote control quadrotors can outperform most birds in open space across most metrics of performance. So is there any reason to continue learning from nature?" said Badger. "Yes. I think it's in how animals interact with complex environments. If we put a bird's brain inside a quadrotor, would the cyborg bird or a normal bird be better at flying through a dense forest in the wind? There may be many sensory and physical advantages to flapping wings in turbulent or cluttered environments."
Obstacle course
To discover how hummingbirds — in this case, four local Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna) — slip through tiny openings, despite being unable to fold their wings, Badger and Dudley teamed up with UC Berkeley students Kathryn McClain, Ashley Smiley and Jessica Ye.
"We set up a two-sided flight arena and wondered how to train birds to fly through a 16-square- centimeter gap in the partition separating the two sides," Badger said, noting that the hummingbirds have a wingspan of about 12 centimeters (4 3/4 inches). "Then, Kathryn had the amazing idea to use alternating rewards."
That is, the team placed flower-shaped feeders containing a sip of sugar solution on both sides of the partition, but only remotely refilled the feeders after the bird had visited the opposite feeder. This encouraged the birds to continually flit between the two feeders through the aperture.
The researchers then varied the shape of the aperture, from oval to circular, ranging in height, width and diameter, from 12 cm to 6 cm, and filmed the birds’ maneuvers with high-speed cameras. Badger wrote a computer program to track the position of each bird’s bill and wing tips as it approached and passed through the aperture.
They discovered that as the birds approached the aperture, they often hovered briefly to assess it before traveling through sideways, reaching forward with one wing while sweeping the second wing back, fluttering their wings to support their weight as they passed through the aperture. They then swiveled their wings forward to continue on their way.
"The thing is, they have to still maintain weight support, which is derived from both wings, and then control the horizontal thrust, which is pushing it forward. And they're doing this with the right and left wing doing very peculiar things," Dudley said. "Once again, this is just one more example of how, when pushed in some experimental situation, we can elicit control features that we don't see in just a standard hovering hummingbird."
Alternatively, the birds swept their wings back and pinned them to their bodies, shooting through — beak first, like a bullet — before sweeping the wings forward and resuming flapping once safely through.
"They seem to do the faster method, the ballistic buzz-through, when they get more acquainted with the system," Dudley said.
Only when approaching the smallest apertures, which were half a wingspan wide, would the birds automatically resort to the tuck and glide, even though they were unfamiliar with the setup.
The team pointed out that only about 8% of the birds clipped their wings as they passed through the partition, although one experienced a major collision. Even then, the bird recovered quickly before successfully reattempting the maneuver and going on its way.
"The ability to pick among several obstacle negotiation strategies can allow animals to reliably squeeze through tight gaps and recover from mistakes," Badger noted.
Dudley hopes to conduct further experiments, perhaps with a sequence of different apertures, to determine how birds navigate multiple obstacles.
The work was funded primarily by a CiBER-IGERT grant from the National Science Foundation (DGE-0903711).
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
Building a space station on the Moon might seem like something out of a science fiction movie, but each new lunar mission is bringing that idea closer to reality. Scientists are homing in on potential lunar ice reservoirs in permanently shadowed regions, or PSRs. These are key to setting up any sort of sustainable lunar infrastructure.
In late August 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down on the lunar surface in the south polar region, which scientists suspect may harbor ice. This landing marked a significant milestone not only for India but for the scientific community at large.
For planetary scientists like me, measurements from instruments onboard Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander and its small, six-wheeled rover Pragyan provide a tantalizing up-close glimpse of the parts of the Moon most likely to contain ice. Earlier observations have shown ice is present in some permanently shadowed regions, but estimates vary widely regarding the amount, form and distribution of these ice deposits.
Polar ice deposits
My team at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics has a goal of understanding where water on the Moon came from. Comets or asteroids crashing into the Moon are options, as are volcanic activity and solar wind.
Each of these events leaves behind a distinctive chemical fingerprint, so if we can see those fingerprints, we might be able to trace them to the source of water. For example, sulfur is expected in higher amounts in lunar ice deposits if volcanic activity rather than comets created the ice.
Like water, sulfur is a “volatile” element on the Moon, because on the lunar surface it’s not very stable. It’s easily vaporized and lost to space. Given its temperamental nature, sulfur is expected to accumulate only in the colder parts of the Moon.
While the Vikram lander didn’t land in a permanently shadowed region, it measured the temperature at a high southern latitude of 69.37°S and was able to identify sulfur in soil grains on the lunar surface. The sulfur measurement is intriguing because sulfur may point toward the source of the Moon’s water.
So, scientists can use temperature as a way of finding where volatiles like these may end up. Temperature measurements from Chandrayaan-3 could allow scientists to test models of volatile stability and figure out how recently the sulfur may have accumulated at the landing site.
Tools for discovery
Vikram and Pragyan are the newest in a series of spacecraft that have helped scientists study water on the Moon. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched in 2009 and has spent the past several years observing the Moon from orbit. I’m a co-investigator on LRO, and I use its data to study the distribution, form and abundance of water on the lunar poles.
Both India’s Chandrayaan-1 orbiter and LRO have allowed my colleagues and me to use ultraviolet and near-infrared observations to identify ice in the permanently shadowed regions by measuring the chemical fingerprints of water. We’ve definitively detected water ice in some of these regions inside the coldest shadows at the lunar poles, but we’re still not sure why the ice isn’t more widespread.
On Mercury, by contrast, the permanently shadowed regions are practically overflowing with ice. For several years, scientists have recognized the need to get down on the surface and make more detailed measurements of lunar volatiles. With its sulfur detections, the Vikram lander has now taken the first tentative steps as part of a larger exploration program.
Future lunar missions
NASA has its sights set on the lunar south pole. Leading up to the Artemis III mission to deploy astronauts to investigate ice on the surface, the Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program will send multiple landers and rovers to search for ice starting later in 2023.
While uncertainty surrounds the timeline of Artemis launches, the first crewed mission, Artemis II, is on track for a late 2024 or early 2025 launch, with a looping trajectory passing behind the Moon’s far side and back to Earth.
The Lunar Compact Infrared Imaging System, of which I’m the principal investigator, is an infrared camera that will take temperature measurements and study the surface composition of the Moon.
Dubbed L-CIRiS, this camera recently underwent its final review before delivery to NASA, and the completed flight instrument will be prepared to launch on a commercial lander in late 2026.
Prior to L-CIRiS, the VIPER rover mission is planned to launch in late 2024 to the lunar south polar region, where it will carry instruments to search for ice in micro-cold traps. These tiny shadows, some no larger than a penny, are hypothesized to contain a significant amount of water and are more accessible than the larger PSRs.
One long-term goal of L-CIRiS and NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is to find a suitable place for a long-term, sustainable lunar station. Astronauts could stay at this station, potentially similar to the one at McMurdo station in Antarctica, but it would need to be somewhat self-sufficient to be economically viable. Water is extremely expensive to ship to the Moon, hence locating the station near ice reservoirs is a must.
During the Artemis III mission, NASA astronauts will use the information gathered by the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and other missions, including Chandrayaan-3, to assess the best locations to collect samples. Chandrayaan-3 and L-CIRiS’s measurements of temperature and composition are like those that will be needed for Artemis to succeed. Cooperation among space agencies young and old is thus becoming a key feature of a long-term, sustainable human presence on the Moon.
Paul Hayne, Assistant Professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
On Friday, Redwood Community Services began operating the shelter, located in the former juvenile hall facility at 1111 Whalen Way in north Lakeport.
Unlike how it’s been run in the past, the shelter will now operate around the clock, seven days a week, and won’t require clients to leave during the day.
It will provide up to 35 guests with stable shelter, breakfast, dinner, showers, laundry and support services.
At its Nov. 14 meeting, the Board of Supervisors approved a new $2,417,489.64, three-year shelter contract between the Lake County Behavioral Health Services Department — acting as the lead administrative entity for the Lake County Continuum of Care — and Redwood Community Services to run the shelter, as Lake County News has reported.
Under the new contract, Redwood Community Services will run the shelter through June 30, 2026.
The organization also runs the Building Bridges Homeless Resource Center in Ukiah.
Redwood Community Services staff unanimously approved a new name to mark this new start: Xamitin Haven.
Xamitin (pronounced hahm-i-tin, with a soft “a” as in “father”) is a Northern Pomo word meaning “lake” or “water lying.”
Redwood Community Services will initially work with the 35 current shelter guests. Further information on the intake process and availability will be released very soon.
“We want to support [shelter guests] with getting stable,” said notes Redwood Community Services’ Integrated Health Director Sage Wolf, MSW. “To assist us with that process, we will not be taking in new guests for at least the next week. Staff are making a point to connect with new people who present to the shelter, and encourage them to come back the week of Dec. 11 to get further information.”
Wolf added, “We are also working toward having space in the shelter to accommodate families with children. We expect it may be roughly a month before we are able to accept a full family.”
“The county of Lake would like to thank all who have supported the emergency shelter since it first opened to help unhoused individuals navigate the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Elise Jones, Lake County’s Behavioral Health Services director, in a written statement. “Blue Horizons staff and local lodging operators were critical partners over the past month’s time of transition. Thank you all!”
Wolf said Redwood Community Services is excited to build on the work of previous operators. “We are grateful for the opportunity to serve our unhoused neighbors,” Wolf said. “Further official information will be made available as soon as possible.”
Questions can be directed to Sage Wolf of RCS by email,
Redwood Community Services can also be reached at 707-467-2010.