Amina Mohammed, the deputy secretary general of the United Nations, plans to arrive in Côte d’Ivoire on Saturday ahead of a key meeting on desertification and land use in Abidjan. The meeting, the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention to Combat Desertification (COP15), is considered to be a…
A global expert on soil health who began his research career in Nigeria has been named the recipient of the 2020 World Food Prize. Dr. Rattan Lal, who grew up as a refugee on a smallholder farm in India, received the US$250,000 prize for his work in protecting and improving…
A group of international researchers working in the Democratic Republic of Congo say that deforestation, typically to use more land for agriculture, may be adding carbon dioxide into the planet’s atmosphere through a different and less understood pathway. While the broader effects of deforestation are known, the new research suggests…
Dangerously high levels of mercury and a related toxin are pervasive in rivers and soils near artisanal gold mines in Senegal, according to a new study from Duke University. “Nearly every sample we collected from in and around four mining villages contained mercury concentrations higher than regulatory standards set by…
There are tiny pieces of Madagascar in orbit, and Russian scientists on the International Space Station (ISS) think they may be evidence for why the upper limit of Earth’s biosphere could be raised higher. Russian cosmonauts aboard the ISS have taken 19 different samples, on missions across the years between…