All publications and documents

The COVID-19 pandemic is both a wake-up call to the vulnerability of our food systems and an insight into the ongoing threat posed by the climate crisis to nutritional security and our collective health. Although these two crises threaten food systems through different mechanisms, they share a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable and emphasise the need for a global food systems…

Land use change—for example, the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural or urban ecosystems—is widely recognized to influence the risk and emergence of zoonotic disease in humans1,2. However, whether such changes in risk are underpinned by predictable ecological changes remains unclear. It has been suggested that habitat disturbance might cause predictable changes in the local diversity…

Through the Desert Garden program, scientists and refugees have turned two problems — the inability to grow fresh fruits and vegetables in desert refugee camps and a warehouse of unrecyclable foam mattresses — into a humanitarian solution. The Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan is a UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) safe haven for 80,000 refugees from the Syrian war. It is inhabited by many…

Restrictions to reduce human interaction have helped to avoid greater suffering and death from the COVID-19 pandemic, but have also created socioeconomic hardship. This disruption is unprecedented in the modern era of global observing networks, pervasive sensing and large-scale tracking of human mobility and behaviour, creating a unique test bed for understanding the Earth System. In this…

This review examines the role of the atmospheric evaporative demand (AED) in drought. AED is a complex concept and here we discuss possible AED definitions, the subsequent metrics to measure and estimate AED, and the different physical drivers that control it. The complex influence of AED on meteorological, environmental/agricultural and hydrological droughts is discussed, stressing the important…

A number of industrial crops have been promoted in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to meet a range of policy objectives including economic growth, rural development, agricultural modernization and energy security. The food security impacts of industrial crop production have received extensive policy attention and have been widely discussed in the academic literature. There is, however, an overall lack…