FAO Chief Scientist Charles Spillane visited Brussels on 24 and 25 September to participate in the EU AgRI 2040 Conference and exchange with research and inn...

Trade disruptions contributed to higher cereal quotations, while adverse weather weighs on sugar production prospects.

arXiv, and the scientific community at large, are facing a watershed moment. Scholarly publishing is currently changing at a rapid pace, and we are seeing a…

As genomics infrastructure expands, current governance will determine whether it advances global health equity or entrenches disparities, locking biased data into future clinical tools. This Comment c...

Switzerland, Sweden, the US, the Republic of Korea and Singapore are the world’s most-innovative economies, according to WIPO’s Global Innovation Index 2026, which also shows that AI is driving a rebo...

The World Bank’s September 2026 global poverty update estimates that 824 million people lived in extreme poverty in 2024, with progress remaining sharply uneven across regions.

Low phosphorus use efficiency limits crop production while accelerating the depletion of finite phosphorus resources and environmental pollution. Using a machine learning framework that incorporates f...

Despite their critical importance for policy and research, high-resolution poverty data remain limited across much of Africa. Machine learning (ML) with earth observation (EO) imagery has recently eme...

21.09.2026 – Seven breached Planetary Boundaries continue to worsen as record ocean heat, droughts, floods, wildfires and extreme heat reveal an Earth system under strain, according to the latest Plan...

When women lead and power is shared, all SDGs advance. Yet equal representation remains out of reach, and hard-won gains are at risk as funding falls, civic spaces narrow, and violence against women in politics rises. Read the Gender Snapshot for the latest data on progress towards gender equality.

An AI forecasting system called WeatherNext Cyclones can predict the track, intensity (maximum wind speed) and size of tropical cyclones with an accuracy gain over leading operational models comparabl...

The World Bank’s September 2026 global poverty update estimates that 824 million people lived in extreme poverty in 2024, with progress remaining sharply uneven across regions.

Soil salinity reduces crop productivity and increases reactive nitrogen losses. A global nitrogen budget shows that saline soil management could improve yields, reduce pollution and generate economic ...

The authors consider greening trends and interannual variability, linked to ecosystem stability, in dryland ecosystems across 40 years (1982–2020). They show persistent greening yet increased interann...

Solar interfacial evaporation is a promising solution for water purification. Here this work addresses the bottleneck of slow kinetics of water molecule desorption by constructing a dual-phase heteros...

Delphy makes near-real-time and scalable Bayesian phylogenetics possible for growing viral outbreaks, enabling public health bodies anywhere to analyse and react to their own data with state-of-t...

Food and beverage manufacturers have the potential to contribute to the transition towards a more nutritious and sustainable food system. By analysing products sold by 44 major food and beverage manuf...

The development bank and others are starting to publish and verify the raw data and code accompanying their research-based reports and papers. Other agencies should do the same.

Climate extremes increasingly threaten global food production. This study shows that cropland exposure to multiple hazards is rising worldwide, especially in major breadbasket regions, with vulnerabil...

Analysis of age-specific dietary emissions in 149 countries shows that adolescents and young adults have the highest per capita emissions, while population aging, particularly in higher-income regions...

Many biotic interactions occur via chemical compounds released in the environment. Here the authors review the field of chemical ecology and discuss the importance of investigating landscape-scale che...

This Review discusses how polyploidy shapes crop evolution and environmental adaptation by genome duplication, phenotypic plasticity and stress responses, and proposes how these insights can accelerat...

By integrating the best available spatial and statistical datasets, this analysis estimates the deforestation associated with the production of 184 agricultural and forestry commodities across 179 cou...

Food systems substantially impact carbon storage and biodiversity, with food consumption driving four-fifths of losses on agricultural land, particularly through animal-sourced foods. Targeted interve...

In rice, the P4-ATPase complex OsALA5–OsALIS2 rapidly stabilizes membrane fluidity in response to high temperature by flipping saturated phosphatidylcholines to the cytosolic leaflet of the plasma mem...

Soybeans are central to global food security, but rising demand for animal-sourced foods has made China highly dependent on imports, creating environmental spillover through deforestation and land-use...

Modeling mitigation and adaptation co-benefits in rice systems in Bangladesh, Rosenzweig, Cynthia, Valdivia, Roberto O, McDermid, Sonali, Li, Tao, Contreras, Erik Mencos, Hussain, Sk Ghulam, Alam, Md Rajibul, Chaki, Apurbo K, Naher, Umme A, Rashid, Md Bazlur, Sapkota, Tek B, Kadam, Sanketa, Kozlowski, Natalie, Krupnik, Timothy J

Defining cities and measuring what is urban shapes knowledge across fields. But delineations from what is rural and boundaries at the edges of cities or within them are not always harmonized across co...

Host antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are a frontline defense against infection. Now, it has been shown that maturation of AMP repertoires early in life can predict stable host coexistence with a highly ...

Scenario simulations using global economic models show that by 2050 the transformation of food systems towards healthy diets, improved productivity and halving of food waste result in a restructu...

Deng et al. leverage AI and large-scale transcriptome data to map drought-response gene networks, uncovering conserved and lineage-specific regulatory patterns, and revealing that drought resistance i...

Rising temperatures have altered the balance of soil carbon stored versus respired in forest ecosystems worldwide. Yet, the molecular-level mechanisms…

Enacting the social and environmental change needed to address the most pressing sustainability challenges can prove unwieldy. However, identifying positive tipping points that accelerate positive fee...

Managing soils to increase organic carbon presents a potential opportunity to mitigate and adapt to global change challenges. However, soils differ widely in their biophysical limits for carbon accum....

General purpose AI tools for science, such as Claude Science, promise to accelerate research. But which is right for you?

When households install rooftop solar panels, they often increase their electricity consumption due to the perception of ‘free’ energy, a phenomenon known as the solar rebound effect. Energy scenarios...

Human-driven disturbances intensify and prolong evapotranspiration declines across South American ecosystems, disrupting the water balance and threatening ecological resilience, according to hydrologi...

npj Sustainable Agriculture - Fertilizer and soil health for sustained crop production in sub-Saharan Africa: Theory and conceptual framework

R2 retrotransposons are used to integrate DNA into plant and crop 25S ribosomal DNA sites.