Nature
EDITORIAL
16 OCTOBER 2019
Counting the hidden $12-trillion cost of a broken food system
The world’s food system costs trillions in poor health and ecological damage. On World Food Day, governments and researchers must commit to more-regular audits of these unseen expenses.
There’s an unfolding tragedy at the heart of the world’s food system and its cause lies mainly at the door of governments, food manufacturers and agribusinesses.
The situation is urgent. One-third of all food goes to waste, and yet governments and other players in the food system are unable to prevent 820 million people from regularly going hungry. The food industry, especially, bears responsibility for the fact that 680 million people are obese, but it is largely governments and their citizens who have to pick up the costs of treatment.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03117-y?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20191017&utm_source=nature_etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20191017&sap-outbound-id=0D550FC3F07F2E020C0045319AD35E51954C173A&utm_source=hybris-campaign&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=000_SKN6563_0000016052_41586-Nature-20191017-EAlert&utm_content=EN_internal_35281_20191017&mkt-key=005056B0331B1EE782E3E186D2CF1D08
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Nature
WORLD VIEW
16 OCTOBER 2019
Data on child deaths are a call for justice
To save young lives, governments must support families, respect women and tackle inequality, says Michelle Bachelet.
The chances of newborns surviving to adulthood have never been greater: in the past 20 years, rates of childhood death have fallen by more than half. Nearly all 193 United Nations member states have made tremendous progress. But within each country, disparities condemn many children to premature death.
PDF version
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Science 18 Oct 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6463, pp. 315
DOI: 10.1126/science.aay7988
LETTERS
Forest restoration: Overlooked constraints
- Eike Luedeling1, et al.
In their Report “The global tree restoration potential” (5 July, p. 76), J.-F. Bastin et al. use machine learning to derive the carbon storage potential of global tree restoration, which they identify as the most effective climate change mitigation option. However, the study likely overestimates the actual potential by identifying opportunities for increasing canopy cover in environments with obvious environmental or socioeconomic constraints.
In high-latitude regions of Russia, Scandinavia, and North America, permafrost and short growing seasons (1) impair tree growth. In large parts of Australia and other arid and hyperarid regions, salinity, sodicity, hardpans, and moisture limitations prevent tree establishment (2, 3). In African grasslands, infertile soils, grazing animals, water constraints, and wildfires maintain patchy shrub–grass environments (4). In areas with severely degraded soils and biodiversity loss in the Americas and in Asia (5, 6), prospects of restoring pre-degradation canopy cover are limited. In grazing lands and production forests, abandoning current uses implies staggering absolute opportunity costs. Finally, Bastin et al. excluded areas classified as urban, but the data set they used (7) fails to recognize some major urban centers and many towns and villages in rural areas (7); more than 2.5 billion people live in areas that Bastin et al. considered eligible for restoration (8), including entire cities, such as Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Science 18 Oct 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6463, pp. 316-317
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz0705
LETTERS
Forest restoration: Expanding agriculture
In their Report “The global tree restoration potential” (5 July, p. 76), J.-F. Bastin et al. determine the available potential forest restoration area by excluding areas with existing trees, urban settlement, and cropland. However, they overestimate the potential area because they do not account for projected agricultural land expansion or current use of pasture land.
There is evidence from satellite imagery that most of global agricultural land expansion in the previous three decades happened and is still happening on tropical forest land, especially in Brazil and Southeast Asia (1–3). Given that this trend is likely to continue, especially in the highly productive areas in Central and South America, agricultural land expansion must be taken into
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Science 18 Oct 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6463, pp. 317
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz2148
LETTERS
Forest restoration: Transformative trees—Response
Luedeling and colleagues argue that we have overestimated the restoration capacity in several regions of the world. Our model predicts the expected optimal tree cover from a combination of 10 environmental variables that were selected through a variable selection procedure to avoid overfitting issues. As detailed in table S1 of our supplementary material, these 10 variables include mean annual temperature, temperature of the wettest quarter, annual precipitation, precipitation seasonality, precipitation of the driest quarter, elevation, hillshade, soil organic carbon, sand content, and depth to bedrock. These ecological variables cover average and seasonal variation in climate and variation in topographic and edaphic conditions. As such, we have done everything that is possible to represent all of the conditions raised by Luedeling and colleagues.
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Science 18 Oct 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6463, pp. 310-312
DOI: 10.1126/science.aay0339
POLICY FORUMSYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
Technological challenges and milestones for writing genomes
- Nili Ostrov, et al.
Engineering biology with recombinant DNA, broadly called synthetic biology, has progressed tremendously in the last decade, owing to continued industrialization of DNA synthesis, discovery and development of molecular tools and organisms, and increasingly sophisticated modeling and analytic tools. However, we have yet to understand the full potential of engineering biology because of our inability to write and test whole genomes, which we call synthetic genomics. Substantial improvements are needed to reduce the cost and increase the speed and reliability of genetic tools. Here, we identify emerging technologies and improvements to existing methods that
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Science 18 Oct 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6463, pp. 308-309
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz4520
PERSPECTIVEECOLOGY
Rapid reorganization of global biodiversity
- Britas Klemens Eriksson1,
- Helmut Hillebrand2,3
The Pacific oyster is native to Pacific Asia but has spread through accidental introductions across the world. Today, it is found on shores in Australia, Europe, New Zealand, and North America.
Twenty-five years of research on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function have revealed that biodiversity drives fundamental ecosystem processes and regulates their temporal and spatial stability (1, 2). Despite clear signs that human efforts have failed to halt global biodiversity loss (3, 4), it has been difficult to identify corresponding signs of global-loss trends in the context of local ecosystems (5–9). On page 339 of this issue, Blowes et al. (10) report their analysis of local biodiversity changes using a large dataset of >50,000 biodiversity time series from 239 studies.
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Sociologia Ruralis, Vol. 59, No. 4
Farming and Fishing ‐ Diverse Rural Livelihoods
Farmers’ Perceptions of Climate Change in Context: Toward a Political Economy of Relevance
Matthew Houser
Ryan Gunderson
Diana Stuart
https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12268
Sociologists commonly hypothesise that experiencing the impacts of climate change will lead actors, including farmers, to desire to address climate change. It is increasingly clear that farmers can detect the regional biophysical expressions and impacts of climate change. However, this has not led farmers to desire to take action on climate change. This begs the question: how then are farmers interpreting these experiences? We argue that political‐economic context, the structural conditions of capitalist production, contributes to how farmers perceive and understand the impacts of climate change. We draw from our novel political economy of relevance theoretical framework and apply this framework to a sample of over 100 qualitative interviews with Iowa and Indiana row‐crop farmers. We focus on their experiences with heavy rain events, a key impact of climate change in the Midwest. Our findings suggest that farmers become aware of, interpret and respond to heavy rain events within the context of capitalist production. This leads most farmers to see heavy rain events as barriers to achieving capitalist goals, rather than as signals of the reconsider climate scepticism or the need to mitigate contributions to climate change.
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The Lancet Planetary Health VOLUME 3, ISSUE 10, PE429-E438, OCTOBER 01, 2019
The global effect of extreme weather events on nutrient supply: a superposed epoch analysis
Caro S Park, et al.
Background
To date, the effects of extreme weather events on nutrient supply within the population have not been quantified. In this study, we investigated micronutrient, macronutrient, and fibre supply changes during 175 extreme weather events within 87 countries in the year that a major extreme weather event occurred, with a targeted focus on low-income settings.
Methods
We collected data from the International Disasters Database and the Global Expanded Nutrient Supply model for the period 1961–2010, and applied superposed epoch analysis to calculate the percentage change in nutrient supply during the year of an extreme weather event relative to its historical context. We composited globally and by subgroup (EU, landlocked developing countries, least developed countries, low-income food deficit countries, and net food-importing developing countries). Lastly, we reported nutrient supply changes in terms of recommended dietary allowance for children aged 1–3 years.
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Diversity and distribution
BIODIVERSITY RESEARCH
Open Access
The biodiversity benefit of native forests and mixed‐species plantations over monoculture plantations
Xiaoyang Wang et al.
https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.12972
Abstract
Aim
China’s Grain for Green Program (GFGP) is the largest reforestation programme in the world and has been operating since 1999. The GFGP has promoted the establishment of tree plantations over the restoration of diverse native forests. In a previous study, we showed that native forests support a higher species richness and abundance of birds and bees than do GFGP plantations and that mixed‐species GFGP plantations support a higher level of bird (but not bee) diversity than do any individual GFGP monocultures (although still below that of native forests). Here, we use metabarcoding of arthropod diversity to test the generality of these results.