"Many rural counties in the United States face the dual challenges of lagging economic growth and increasingly severe effects of climate change.

These challenges have been intensified by economic losses from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated existing inequalities and highlighted urgent infrastructure needs. At the same time, catastrophic wildfires, record heatwaves, drought and other severe weather events linked to climate change threaten rural communities and livelihoods."

The world faces a growing food systems crisis. The number of people who go to sleep hungry around the world grew by over 100 million in 2020. At the same time, the human quest for food is responsible for about a quarter of all global greenhouse gas emissions. That quest consumes more than 70% of all freshwater, is a major polluter of water and the leading driver of forest and biodiversity loss.

These crises are the reason for the UN Food Systems Summit, scheduled for September 2021 with a Pre-Summit happening at the end of July. It’s the first-of-its-kind opportunity for nations around the globe to tackle the question: How can we nutritiously feed a growing population amid worsening climate change while holding the line on further conversion of natural ecosystems, meeting the Paris Climate Agreement and lifting millions of farmers out of poverty?

The African Development Bank (AfDB) Group and Green Growth Knowledge Partnership (GGKP) have launched a call for proposals to identify a technical partner to apply robust natural capital methods, support data collection and generate convincing results to influence infrastructure decision making in African development finance.

There are two AfDB infrastructure projects in Mozambique and Madagascar for which proposals are requested. One proposal for each country will be selected in this round.

French and Portuguese versions of the request for proposals (RfPs) are available.

The connection between climate change and agriculture (both crops and livestock) is complex. On the one hand, agriculture is adversely affected by climate change (Aryal et al. 2020a; Lobell et al. 2011), but on the other hand, it is also one of the major factors exacerbating climate change (Smith et al. 2008; Aryal et al. 2020b). Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) could play a crucial role in reducing GHG emissions and mitigating the adverse effects of climate change.

European Union negotiators struck a deal on reforms to the bloc's huge farming subsidy programme on Friday, introducing new measures aimed at protecting small farms and curbing agriculture's environmental impact.

The deal ends a near three-year struggle over the future of the EU Common Agricultural Policy, which will suck up around a third of the EU's 2021-2027 budget, spending 387 billion euros on payments to farmers and support for rural development.

Representatives from EU member states and European Parliament clinched the agreement, which aims to shift money from intensive farming practices to protecting nature, and rein in the 10% of EU greenhouse gases emitted by agriculture.

The European Union's huge subsidy programme for agriculture is failing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from farming, despite 100 billion euros of such subsidies being labelled as climate spending since 2014, auditors said on Monday.

The reservoir created by Hoover Dam has sunk to its lowest level ever, underscoring the gravity of the extreme drought across the U.S. West. Droughts are a recurring natural hazard but made worse recently by an accumulation of extremely dry years for most of this century. Scientists say human-influenced climate change has exacerbated the situation.