ECA Deputy Executive Secretary for Programme Support, Mama Keita.

By Busani Bafana
TANGIER, Morocco, Apr 1 2026 (IPS)

Africa must move swiftly to harness data and frontier technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive its economic growth and make the continent globally competitive in the digital economy, a senior official at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) has told policymakers.

Opening the Committee of Experts segment of the Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development meeting in Tangier, ECA Deputy Executive Secretary for Programme Support Mama Keita emphasised that technological innovation is the key to unlocking Africa’s development potential. Africa has been slow to harness technological innovation to drive industrialisation and economic growth.

“Frontier technologies and innovation are not only useful to unlock Africa’s growth potential and enhance the competitiveness of African economies through productivity growth and diversification,” Keita said. She emphasised that technological innovations can be used to accelerate structural transformation, allowing the much-needed reallocation of resources from low- to high-productivity sectors.

Frontier technologies, including AI, the Internet of Things, and biotechnology, are boosting productivity, enhancing competitiveness, and enabling global economic diversification, but Africa is taking its time to join the party.

Keita, in remarks on behalf of ECA Executive Secretary Claver Gatete, questioned why Africa was not harnessing frontier technologies to utilise its natural resources and tap its youthful population and sizeable markets to boost productivity.

The conference, themed ‘Growth through innovation: harnessing data and frontier technologies for the economic transformation of Africa’, is being held at a critical moment for Africa, which is fast gaining global attention as the next frontier for investment, human capital, and mineral resource development. Despite trade uncertainty, Africa’s economic growth is on the rise.

Keita noted that the conference was an opportunity for policymakers to examine how technology-driven solutions can accelerate structural transformation and deliver more sustainable economic growth in Africa.

Despite averaging 3.5 percent GDP growth between 2000 and 2023, Africa has struggled to convert this expansion into productivity gains. Keita observed that growth has largely been driven by capital and labour accumulation, with little contribution from productivity improvements—an imbalance that innovation and advanced technologies could help correct.

Effective Regulation, Financing and Data Systems Needed

Frontier technologies and data can enable Africa to shift resources from low-productivity sectors to higher-value activities while also improving living standards with effective regulation and financing robust data systems  in place.

Africa suffers from poor data, which constrains effective planning and decision-making for development projects. The ECA’s flagship Economic Report on Africa 2026, to be launched during the conference, argues that harnessing data and technologies like AI, machine learning and robotics is now an imperative for Africa.

Technology Delivers

“There is no doubt that digital platforms, underpinned by frontier technologies such as AI, the Internet of Things, and blockchain, hold significant potential to reduce poverty, generate employment opportunities, promote economic integration, and drive economic growth,” Keita said.

Across the continent, signs are there of how technology innovation is driving development. Digital payment systems and mobile-money platforms are transforming Africa’s economies by lowering transaction costs, boosting efficiency, enhancing access to finance and markets, and advancing financial inclusion.

Nearly 30 per cent of the world’s critical minerals that are essential for clean-energy technologies are in Africa, which gives  the continent a comparative advantage over other continents.

Strategic industries such as digital technologies and telecommunications also depend on the critical minerals, making Africa an indispensable actor in this vital and fast-growing space, she said.

Frontier technologies have boosted crop productivity, enhanced water and land-use efficiency, and promoted climate resilience and adaptation in agriculture.

But Not all is Rosy

Keita said Africa risks falling behind global peers in harnessing the benefits of frontier technologies. AI, for example, is projected to contribute about 5.6 percent to GDP across Africa, Oceania and parts of developing Asia by 2030—lagging behind contributions expected in more advanced economies.

“The adoption of frontier technologies is not all roses, as this is associated with several risks that cannot be ignored,”  Keita warned. “The storage of most of Africa’s data in data centres outside the continent is a big problem, particularly for sensitive data such as medical, financial, and security data, given the sensitivity of such data. It is also costly and results in delays in data transmission.”

Africa currently accounts for less than one percent of global data centre capacity, limiting the deployment of data-intensive technologies like AI, according to the ECA.

“The disruptive effects of new technologies on the African labour market cannot be ignored,” Keita stated, adding that technology tends to cause job losses quickly, while job creation often occurs slowly.

But Africa’s demographic profile of having more young people presents a competitive advantage if it is aligned with the demands of a digital economy.

Globally, AI and automation are expected to create 170 million jobs while displacing 92 million jobs by 2030, resulting in a net gain of 78 million jobs.  Africa can only benefit from these new jobs if it prioritises providing enhanced digital skills training to its population.

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Nature-positive business operations can contribute to both business success and the environment, according to IPBES’ Business Biodiversity Assessment. Credit: iStock/IPBES

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe & MANCHESTER, United Kingdom, Feb 9 2026 (IPS)

Business can still remain profitable while protecting the environment but invest in nature-positive operations, says a landmark report by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which finds that global companies have contributed to the escalating loss of biodiversity.

The IPBES Methodological Assessment Report on the Impact and Dependence of Business on Biodiversity and Nature’s Contributions to People, known as the Business and Biodiversity Report, says global business has benefited from nature but has immensely contributed to the decline in biodiversity. It is time it changes how it does business because biodiversity decline is a “critical systemic risk threatening the economy, financial stability, and human well-being.”

The global economy, driven by business, is dependent on healthy biodiversity and nature for materials, climate regulation, clean water, and pollination. However, the current economic system treats nature as free and infinite, creating perverse incentives for its exploitation. Businesses are largely rewarded for short-term profit, even when their activities degrade the natural systems they rely on, creating a huge risk to the economy and society, the report said.

The cover of the Business and Biodiversity Report. Credit: IPBES

It Must Be Business Unusual Now

Approved at the recent 12th session of the IPBES Plenary, held in Manchester, United Kingdom, the report calls for the end of business as usual. Global businesses, heavily dependent on nature and impacted by nature, must quickly change their operations or face collapse.

“Businesses and other key actors can either lead the way towards a more sustainable global economy or ultimately risk extinction… both of species in nature but potentially also their own,” noted the report.

Based on thousands of sources and prepared over three years by 79 leading experts from 35 countries from all regions of the world, the report is the first assessment of the impacts and dependencies of business on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.

Current conditions perpetuate business as usual and do not support the transformative change necessary to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, said the report, pointing out that large subsidies that drive biodiversity losses are directed to business activities with the support of businesses and trade associations.

For example, in 2023, global public and private finance flows with directly negative impacts on nature were estimated at USD 7.3 trillion. Of this amount, private finance accounted for USD 4.9 trillion, with public spending on environmentally harmful subsidies at about USD 2.4 trillion, the report said.

In contrast, USD 220 billion in public and private finance flows were directed to activities contributing to the conservation and restoration of biodiversity, representing just 3 percent of the public funds and incentives that encourage harmful business behaviour or prevent behaviour beneficial to biodiversity.

The new report shows that business as usual is not inevitable – with the right policies, as well as financial and cultural shifts, what is good for nature is also what is best for profitability, said Prof. Stephen Polasky, co-chair of the assessment, who highlighted that the loss of biodiversity was among the most serious threats to business.

“Business as usual may once have seemed profitable in the short term, but impacts across multiple businesses can have cumulative effects, aggregating to global impacts, which can cross ecological tipping points,” Polasky said.

Polasky said during a press briefing today (February 9, 2026) that business can immediately act without waiting for governments to create an enabling environment. They can measure their impact and dependencies by increasing the efficiencies of their operation, reducing waste and understanding new business opportunities and products.

A 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by IPBES warned that one million species face extinction in the next few years as a result of overexploitation of resources, development, and other human activities, posing serious consequences for people and the planet.

Global business, which turns profits from nature, has contributed to the loss of biodiversity as a result of poor production practices that have poisoned river systems, emitted dangerous high greenhouse gases and led to land degradation. This is despite business being affected by natural disasters, from extreme weather floods and droughts to climate change.

The report is the latest assessment by IPBES, an independent intergovernmental body comprising more than 150 member governments. IPBES, often described as the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) for biodiversity, provides policymakers with objective scientific assessments about the state of knowledge regarding the planet’s biodiversity, ecosystems and the contributions they make to people.

IPBES Chair, David Oburo,  said the assessments done by IPBES are balanced by the knowledge systems needed to integrate information business and its impacts and dependencies on biodiversity.

He said there is a need to move away from the scientific language often used in talking about impacts and dependencies of businesses to simplifying it to be about risks and opportunities “so that the messaging that comes out from our assessments is really accessible to the audience that needs to access that information.”

The IPBES methodological assessment report warned that the current system was broken because what is profitable for businesses often results in loss of biodiversity.

A Peruvian indigenous Quechua woman weaving a textile with the traditional techniques in Cusco, Peru. The IPBES Business and Biodiversity Report suggests business should integrate Indigenous knowledge into their operations. Credit: iStock/IPBES

IPBES Executive Secretary, Luthando Dziba, said nature was everybody’s business. The conservation and restorative use of biodiversity is central to business success. Although businesses have contributed to innovations that have driven improvement of living standards, that same success had come at the cost of biodiversity.

An Enabling Environment Is Good for Biodiversity

The report offers a key solution of creating a new “enabling environment” where what is profitable for business aligns with what is good for biodiversity and society. Current conditions — laws, financial systems, corporate reporting rules, and cultural norms — do not reward businesses for protecting nature.

There are many barriers to protecting nature, such as the focus on short-term profits versus long-term ecological cycles. In addition, there is a lack of mandatory disclosure and accountability for environmental impacts, inadequate data, metrics, and capacity within the business community, as well as the failure to integrate Indigenous and local knowledge in biodiversity protection.

The creation of an enabling environment needs coordinated action policy and legal frameworks where governments should integrate biodiversity into all trade and sectoral policies. Besides, there is a need to redirect the USD 7.3 trillion in harmful flows using taxes, green bonds, and sustainability-linked loans to reward positive action.

Businesses must engage with Indigenous Peoples and local communities with Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), while access to and sharing of location-specific data on business activities and biodiversity should be improved.  Leverage technology such as remote sensing and artificial intelligence for better monitoring and traceability across business supply chains.

Measure It to Manage It

Another key finding of the report is that business could improve the measurement and management of its impacts and dependencies on nature through appropriate engagement with science and Indigenous and local knowledge.

Assessment co-chair Prof. Ximena Rueda noted that data and knowledge are often siloed, as scientific literature was not written for businesses. Besides, a lack of translation and attention to the needs of business has slowed uptake of scientific findings.

“Among business there is also often limited understanding and recognition of Indigenous Peoples and local communities as stewards of biodiversity and, therefore, holders of knowledge on its conservation, restoration and sustainable use,” said Rueda in a statement.

Industrial development threatens 60 percent of Indigenous lands around the world, and a quarter of all Indigenous territories are under high pressure from resource exploitation. However, Indigenous Peoples and local communities often find themselves inadequately represented in business research and decision-making, said the report.

Commenting on the report, Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), noted that while all businesses depend on nature, some were more exposed to risks stemming from resource depletion and environmental degradation. She said companies need a deeper understanding of the breadth of their dependencies and impacts on biodiversity to act better.

“In too many boardrooms and offices around the world, there is still a dearth of awareness of biodiversity protection as a business investment,” said Schomaker in a statement. “Too often, public policy still incentivises behaviour that drives biodiversity loss.”

While Alexander De Croo, Administrator, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), said too often biodiversity is an invisible and expendable asset on a balance sheet of global companies, but that was changing.

“Awareness is now accelerating of the risks to development if biodiversity fails—and of the economic opportunities and future prosperity that emerge where it thrives,” De Croo said.

The report underscored that we cannot business-as-usual our way out of the biodiversity crisis. Governments need to stop incentivising the destruction of biodiversity and start rewarding environmental stewardship. Besides, business leaders should now integrate natural capital accounting into their business strategy to disclose their environmental footprint while contributing to a positive global economy.

The evidence is clear: our economic prosperity is inextricably linked to nature’s health, and we are severing that vital link at our peril.

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David Oburo, IPBES Chair. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Feb 3 2026 (IPS)

British Monarch King Charles says science is the solution to protecting nature and halting global biodiversity loss, which is threatening humanity’s survival.

In a message to the 12th session of the Plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which opened in Manchester, United Kingdom, this week, King Charles said nature is an important part of humanity but is under serious threat, which science can help tackle.

“We are witnessing an unprecedented, triple crisis of biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution at a pace that far outstrips the planet’s ability to cope,” said King Charles in a message delivered by Emma Reynolds, United Kingdom Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Science is the Solution

“The best available science can help inform decisions and actions to steward nature and, most importantly, to restore it for future generations, “ King Charles noted, pointing out that humanity has the knowledge to reverse the existential crisis and transition towards an economy that prospers in harmony with nature.

Delegates representing the more than 150 IPBES member governments, observers, Indigenous Peoples,  local communities and scientists are meeting for the  IPBES’ 12th Session, expected to approve a landmark new IPBES Business & Biodiversity Assessment. The report,  a 3-year scientific assessment involving 80 expert authors from every region of the world, will become the accepted state of science on the impacts and dependencies of business on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. It will provide decision-makers with evidence and options for action to measure and better manage business relationships with nature.

The King lauded IPBES for bringing together the world’s leading scientists, indigenous and local knowledge, citizen science and government to share valuable knowledge through the Business and Biodiversity Report—the first of its kind.

“I pray with all my heart that it will help shape concrete action for years to come, including leveraging public and private finance to close by 2030 the annual global biodiversity gap of approximately USD 700 billion,” said King Charles.

IPBES Chair, Dr. David Obura, highlighted that the approval of the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment is important just days after the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report again spotlighted biodiversity loss as the second most urgent long-term risk to business around the world.

“In transitioning and transforming, businesses should all experience the rewards of being sustainable and vibrant, benefiting small and large,” Obura emphasized. “The Business Biodiversity assessment synthesizes the many tools and pathways available to do this and provides critical support for businesses across all countries to work with nature and people and not to work against either or both.”

Addressing the same delegates, Emma Reynolds,  UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, highlighted the urgency of collective action, the critical role of science, and the opportunities for business in nature.

Reynolds noted there was momentum around the world as countries were restoring wetlands and forests, communities were reviving degraded landscapes and businesses were increasingly investing in nature after realizing that nature delivers real returns.

“The tide for nature is beginning to turn, but we cannot afford to slow down,” said Reynolds. “The window to halt diversity loss by 2030 is narrowing. We need to build on that momentum, and we need to do it now.”

Multilateralism, a must for protecting nature

Paying tribute to IPBES for supporting scientific research, Reynolds emphasized that the rest of the world must step forward when others are stepping back from international cooperation. This is to demonstrate that protecting and restoring nature was not just an environmental necessity but essential for global security and the economy.

“The UK’s commitment to multilateralism remains steadfast,” she said. “We believe that by working together, sharing knowledge, aligning policies, and holding one another accountable, we can halt and reverse the diversity loss by 2030,.“

In January 2026, the United States withdrew its participation in IPBES, alongside 65  international organizations and bodies, including the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement.

The United States was a founding member of IPBES, and since its establishment in 2012, scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders—including Indigenous Peoples and local communities—from the United States have been among the most engaged contributors to its work.

The approval of the Business and Biodiversity Assessment by IPBES government members this week will be multilateralism in action, she said, noting that the assessment would not be possible without the critical role of science.

Reynolds underscored the need to base sound policy on solid scientific evidence. Decisions made in negotiating rooms and capitals around the world must be guided by the best and most up-to-date science available. IPBES  exists to provide exactly that.

Noting that the business depends on nature for raw materials, clean water, a stable climate, and food, Reynolds said companies that recognize their dependency on nature are proving that nature-positive investment works.

“Business as well as the government must act now to protect and restore nature… we have the science. We have the frameworks… What we need now is action.”

“Nature loss is now a systemic economic risk. That’s precisely why the assessment on business impact and dependencies is both urgent and necessary,” said  Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

“The first-ever business and diversity assessment will deliver authoritative evidence on how businesses depend on nature, how they impact it, and what that means for risk, for resilience, and for long-term value creation.”

Business and Biodiversity are linked

Underscoring that biodiversity loss is linked to the wider planetary crisis, Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, paid tribute to IPBES as a provider of science as a public good.

“IPBES has remained a  ‘beacon of knowledge at a time when science  and knowledge itself is under strain and when the voices of disinformation are sometimes louder than the facts,” said Schomaker, noting that ahead of the first global stocktake of progress in the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), the science provided by IPBES would be invaluable.

“The Business and Biodiversity assessment constitutes a win for everyone. Clarifying that biodiversity loss isn’t just an environmental issue; it’s a serious threat to economic systems, livelihoods, business profitability, and societal resilience. Biodiversity simply underpins and provides the stability we all need.”

Target 15 of the KMGBF, focuses on business reducing negative impacts on biodiversity and global businesses need to assess and disclose biodiversity-related impacts.

IPBES executive secretary, Dr. Luthando Dziba, said IPBES was on track to deliver, in the coming years, crucial knowledge and inspiration to support the implementation of current goals and targets of the KMGBF, and to provide the scientific foundation needed by the many processes now shaping the global agenda beyond 2030.

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Jewel City, a newly developed mixed-use precinct situated in the heart of the Johannesburg CBD is meant to create a safe, green and energetic place for people in the city. Credit: Gulshan Khan / Climate Visuals

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Feb 3 2026 (IPS)

Our food, fuel, and fortunes come from nature, but as these resources are turned into profits, the balance between exploiting and replenishing the planet is ever more precarious.

Global businesses impact nature through mining, manufacturing, processing and retail operations. At the same time, nature impacts business operations because there is a loss of biodiversity and extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and high temperatures.

How global business is affecting nature and vice versa is the focus of a new assessment by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to be launched next week as part of the 12th session of the Plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

IPBES is the global science-policy body tasked with providing the best-available evidence to decision-makers for people and nature. IPBES assessment reports respond directly to requests from governments and decision-makers, making them immediately relevant around the world.

The plenary session got underway earlier today (February 3, 2026) with a keynote address from Emma Reynolds, MP, UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and remarks by Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity; Kaveh Zahedi, FAO director of the Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment; IPBES chair Dr. David Obura; and IPBES executive secretary Dr. Luthando Dziba.

“This week you will work to agree on the business and biodiversity assessment; I pray with all my heart that it will help shape concrete action for years to come, including leveraging public and private sector finance,” King Charles said.

Reynolds sounded an optimistic note.

“Around the world, momentum is building. Countries are restoring wetlands and forests. Communities are reviving degraded landscapes. Businesses are discovering that investing in nature delivers real returns. The tide for nature is beginning to turn. But we cannot afford to slow down. The window to halt biodiversity loss by 2030 is narrowing. We need to build on that momentum—and we need to do it now. That is why platforms like IPBES matter more than ever. At a time when some are stepping back from international cooperation, the rest of us must step forward. Together we will demonstrate that protecting and restoring nature isn’t just an environmental necessity; it’s essential for our security, our economy, and our future.”

Obura said the plenary in Manchester was symbolic, as it had been at the forefront of historical and business transformation.

“This is especially important just days after the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report again spotlighted biodiversity loss as the second most urgent long-term risk to business around the world.”

Dziba said IPBES was on course.

“IPBES is therefore on track to deliver—over the coming years—crucial knowledge and inspiration to support the implementation of current goals and targets and to provide the scientific foundation needed by the many processes now shaping the global agenda beyond 2030.”

Professor Ximena Rueda-Fajardo, Co-chair of the BizBiodiversity Assessment. Credit: IPBES

The Business and Biodiversity Assessment report, the first of its kind, presents scientific evidence on how global business depends on and affects nature. Aimed at governments, businesses, financial institutions, civil society, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities, the assessment will provide key insights and options for businesses and financial institutions to derive better outcomes for biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.

After three years of work by 80 of the world’s leading experts from science, the private sector, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities across 35 countries, the assessment will help promote business accountability and transparency while improving producer and consumer knowledge of their impacts and dependencies on nature. The Business and Biodiversity Assessment was completed in a shorter time than other IPBES assessments, which typically cover four years. It was completed in two years at a total cost of more than USD 1.5 million.

Why the Assessment on Business and Biodiversity?

The assessment comes at a time scientists are warning of a climate crisis, as we are off track to reducing carbon emissions and slow progress on phasing out fossil fuels. Global business has a complex link with nature, which provides resources that drive industry, yet nature  impacts global business too.

Speaking to IPBES’s Nature Insight Speed Dating with the Future podcast, co-chair of the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment, Professor Ximena Rueda Fajardo, says engaging with nature is not a business option but a necessity.

“Businesses are both beneficiaries of nature and major contributors to its decline—so they have a critical role in ensuring the wise stewardship of our environment,” says Fajardo, adding that, “This is vital for their bottom line, long-term prosperity and the transformative change needed for more just and sustainable futures.”

IPBES highlights that over half of global GDP (USD 117 trillion of economic activity in 2025) is generated in sectors that are moderately to highly dependent on nature.

Matt Jones, chief impact officer at the UN Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre and co-chair of the report. Credit: Anastasia Rodopoulou ENB/IISD

Business and nature depend on each other. However, there are opposing views between those who advocate for nature and those involved in business on the relationship between the two. But science has found that there are interdependent linkages between nature and business.

More than half of the global economy is dependent on nature through the goods and services it provides, known as ecosystem services.

According to the World Economic Forum, biodiversity is shrinking faster than at any point in human history, and if left unchecked, up to 50 percent of all species may be lost by mid-century. In the last 50 years, land and sea-use change, climate change, natural resource use and exploitation, pollution and invasive alien species have been the major drivers of over 90 percent of the loss of biodiversity.

While it is difficult to quantify ecosystem services like food, medicines, clean air, disease control and climate regulation, they are estimated to be worth more than USD 150 trillion a year. Conservative estimates suggest that the loss of nature could cost the global economy at least USD 479 billion per year by 2050.

The Nature of Business Is Not Always Nature Friendly

Business operations have had a profound impact on nature, from pollution of the environment to waste and loss of biodiversity as a result of manufacturing and processing activities. What’s more, the current use of fossil fuels in powering industries has contributed to the rise in carbon emissions. Should businesses be adopting a new economic model that protects and preserves nature?

The rapid expansion of economic activity, without proper attention to its negative side effects, has taken its toll on nature, which in turn poses serious threats to business, IPBES found.

Engaging with nature is not optional for business but a necessity, says  Ximena Rueda, Co-chair of the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment Fajardo and Professor at the School of Management at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.

“Businesses are both beneficiaries of nature and major contributors to its decline—so they have a critical role in ensuring the wise stewardship of our environment,” says Fajardo, adding that, “This is vital for their bottom line, long-term prosperity and the transformative change needed for more just and sustainable futures.”

A Map for Business To Impact Biodiversity and Nature

The IPBES methodological assessment of the impact and dependence of business on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people is expected to be approved at the 12th session of the IPBES Plenary, which opened in Manchester, United Kingdom, this week.

According to IPBES, the assessment categorizes dependencies and impacts of businesses and financial institutions on biodiversity and  nature’s contributions to people. The assessment will further highlight collaborations needed between governments, the financial sector, consumers, Indigenous Peoples, local communities and civil society. It will also, through recommendations, strengthen efforts by businesses to achieve the goals and targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework by 2030 and the global vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050.

Expected Impacts

The IPBES Business and Biodiversity Report will provide critical information to governments, businesses and the financial sector to best measure the dependencies and impacts of business on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. It will also inform more integrated business and financial decisions and actions to simultaneously achieve the SDGs, the Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement

Matt Jones, chief impact officer at the UN Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre and co-chair of the report, is convinced that there is no business that doesn’t depend on biodiversity. For example, do hairdressers depend on biodiversity?

“There are so many personal care products. There are so many things to do with shampoos that are derived from botanicals, which are derived from the natural world. A huge amount of their value chain is actually contingent on people being able to access products that are naturally derived. Think about it. You look at the adverts for these products. How often are they somebody in a waterfall or somebody in a forest… So even a hairdresser, where you go to get your haircut, absolutely depends on nature.”

Jones notes that the economic system encourages businesses to extract resources from nature. It is almost by default that business will have an impact on nature.

“As soon as you start talking about nature loss and the dependency that businesses have, the conversation changes,” he said. “What we found after people started understanding the risk to the business from nature loss was actually that the level of the conversation fundamentally changed. A business doesn’t just impact nature, but it depends on it.”

“And those interactions, they all create risk to the business if we see nature continuing to decline.”

Conservative estimates suggest that a collapse of essential ecosystem services, including pollination, marine fisheries and timber provision in native forests, could result in annual losses to the global GDP of USD 2.7 trillion by 2030. Similarly, biodiversity loss is believed to be costing the global economy 10 percent of its output annually.

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By Busani Bafana
PRETORIA, Dec 4 2025 (IPS)

Nature is a double-edged sword for global business. A groundbreaking report will reveal how businesses profit from exploiting natural resources while simultaneously impacting biodiversity.

An incisive scientific assessment, the Business and Biodiversity Report, set to be released by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) probes the impact and dependence of business on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.

Business and Biodiversity

This report, the first of its kind, examines the ways in which business benefits from nature and the ways in which global business operations impact nature. Representatives from 152 member governments are expected to approve it at the IPBES’ 12th Plenary session in the United Kingdom in February 2026.

Speaking at a media briefing ahead of the report launch, IPBES Executive Secretary Luthando Dziba said the assessment was commissioned by member governments for them to understand global business relationships with biodiversity. The report is to strengthen the knowledge to support the efforts of global businesses that are dependent on biodiversity and that also impact biodiversity.

“Biodiversity decline also represents a major risk for businesses,” Dziba said, highlighting that there are huge economic risks associated with biodiversity, whose loss is ranked among the top 10 global risks to business.

Dziba noted that the report is set to help businesses understand and measure how they depend on as well as how they impact biodiversity, which can determine actions they take to reduce their impacts on nature.

“Governments have an interest in understanding how other sectors impact biodiversity but also how they depend on biodiversity,” Dziba said. “Considering the unprecedented rates at which biodiversity is declining, this should hopefully be a wake-up call that presents significant risks, for instance, for businesses if biodiversity that they depend on is in such a dire state.”

Governments can design policies and regulations to create an enabling environment for companies to act sustainably by understanding how businesses benefit from and affect biodiversity, according to Dziba.

IPBES, an independent intergovernmental body established to strengthen the science-policy interface on biodiversity and ecosystem services, had published several scientific assessments over the years. The assessments have provided policymakers with up-to-date knowledge on the current  situation and challenges relating to nature, biodiversity, and nature’s contributions to people.

Biodiversity Loss: a Loss to Business

IPBES’ seminal publication, the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, released in 2019, found that 1 million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction, many within decades. Changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change pollution, and invasive alien species are the leading causes of changes in nature.

Nature provides several ecosystem services, like pollination, water purification, climate regulation, and raw materials for business, which make trillions of dollars in value globally. At the same time, global businesses have a negative impact on nature through mining, agriculture production, manufacturing, and gas and oil exploration.

The World Economic Forum has warned that 50 percent of the global economy is threatened by biodiversity loss, calling for a radical change from destructive human activity to a nature-positive economy.

The World Economic Forum’s New Nature Economy Report II, warns about the risks of destroying nature, stating that “USD 44 trillion of economic value generation—over half the world’s total GDP—is potentially at risk as a result of the dependence of business on nature and its services.”

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2022 ranked biodiversity loss as the third most severe threat humanity will face in the next  decade.

In 2024, IPBES launched two reports that highlighted the importance of tackling the biodiversity crisis to unlock business and innovation opportunities. Swift action on protecting biodiversity could generate USD 10 trillion and support over 390 million jobs by 2030, according to IPBES. Failing to act on climate change adds at least USD 500 billion a year in more costs to achieving biodiversity goals.

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Mandeep Tiwana, Secretary General, CIVICUS Global Alliance. Credit: CIVICUS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO & BANGKOK, Oct 31 2025 (IPS)

From the streets of Bangkok to power corridors in Washington, the civil society space for dissent is fast shrinking. Authoritarian regimes are silencing opposition but indirectly fueling corruption and widening inequality, according to a leading global civil society alliance.

The warning is from Mandeep Tiwana, Secretary General of CIVICUS Global Alliance, who points to a troubling trend: civil society is increasingly considered a threat to those in power.

That is a sobering assessment from CIVICUS, which reports that a wave of repression by authoritarian regimes is directly fueling corruption and exploding inequality.

“The quality of democracy on hand around the world is very poor at the moment,” Tiwana tells IPS in an exclusive interview. “That is why civil society organizations are seen as a threat by authoritative leaders and the negative impact of attacking civil society means there is a rise in corruption, there is less inclusion, there is less transparency in public life and more inequality in society.”

His comments come ahead of the 16th International Civil Society Week (ICSW) from 1–5 November 2025 convened by CIVICUS and the Asia Democracy Network. The ICSW will bring together more than 1,300 delegates comprising activists, civil society groups, academics, and human rights advocates to empower citizen action and build powerful alliances. ICSW pays tribute to activists, movements, and civil society achieving significant progress, defending civic freedoms, and showing remarkable resilience despite the many challenges.

The ICSW takes place against a bleak backdrop. According to the CIVICUS Monitor, a research partnership between CIVICUS and over 20 organizations tracking civic freedoms, civil society is under attack in 116 of 198 countries and territories. The fundamental freedoms of expression, association, and peaceful assembly face significant deterrents worldwide.

Protests at COP27 in Egypt. Mandeep Tiwana, Secretary General of CIVICUS Global Alliance, is hopeful that COP30, in Belém, Brazil, will be more inclusive. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“It is becoming increasingly dangerous to be a civil society activist and to be the leader of a civil society organization,” Tiwana tells IPS. “Many organizations have been defunded because governments don’t like what they do to ensure transparency or because they speak out against some very powerful people. It is a challenging environment for civil society.”

Research by CIVICUS categorizes civic freedom in five dimensions: open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed, and closed. Alarmingly, over 70 percent of the world’s population now lives in countries rated in the two worst categories: ‘repressed’ and ‘closed.’

“This marks a regression in democratic values, rights, and accountability,” Tiwana noted, adding that even in the remaining 30% of nations, restrictions on civic freedoms remain.

Repression Tools in Tow

The ICSW, being held under the theme ‘Celebrating citizen action: reimagining democracy, rights, and inclusion for today’s world,’ convenes against this backdrop.

Multifaceted tools are used by governments to stifle dissent. Governments are introducing laws to block civil society organizations from receiving international funding while simultaneously restricting domestic resources. Besides, laws have also been enacted in some countries to restrict the independence of civil society organizations that scrutinize governments and promote transparency.

For civil society activists, the consequences are sobering.

“If you speak truth to power, uncover high-level corruption and try to seek transformative change in society, whether it’s on gender equality or inclusion of minorities you  can be subjected to severe forms of persecution,” Tiwana explained. “This includes stigmatization, intimidation,  imprisonment for long periods, physical attacks, and death.”

Multilateralism Tumbles, Unilateralism Rises

Tiwana said there is an increasing breakdown in multilateralism and respect for international laws from which civil society draws its rights.

This erosion of civic space is reflected in the breakdown of the international system. Tiwana identified a surge in unilateralism and a disregard for the international laws that have historically safeguarded the rights of civil society.

“If you look at what’s happening around the world, whether with regard to conflicts in Palestine, in the Congo, in Sudan, in Myanmar, in Ukraine, in Cameroon, and elsewhere, governments are not respecting international norms,” he observed, remarking that authoritarian regimes were abusing the sovereignty of other countries, ignoring the Geneva conventions, and legalizing attacks on civilians, torturing and persecuting civilians.

This collapse of multilateralism has enabled a form of transactional diplomacy, where narrowly defined national interests trump human rights. Powerful states now collude to manipulate public policy, enhancing their wealth and power. When civil society attempts to expose these corrupt relationships, it becomes a target.

“They are colluding to game public policy to suit their interests and to enhance their wealth.  The offshoot of this is that civil society is attacked when it tries to expose these corrupt relationships,” said Tiwana, expressing concern  about the rise in state capture by oligarchs who now own vast swathes of the media and technology landscapes.

Citing countries like China and Rwanda, which, while they have different ways of functioning, Tiwana said both are powerful authoritarian states engaging in transactional diplomacy and are opposed to the civil society’s power to hold them to account.

The election of Donald Trump as US President in 2025 has shattered the foundation of the US as a democracy, Tiwana noted. The country no longer supports democratic values internationally and is at home with  attacks on the media and defunding of civil society.

The action by the US has negative impacts, as some leaders around the world are taking their cue from Trump in muzzling civil society and media freedoms, he said, pointing to how the US has created common cause with authoritarian governments in El Salvador, Israel,  Argentina, and Hungary.

The fight Goes On

Despite facing repression and threats, civil society continues to resist authoritarian regimes. From massive street protests against corruption in Nepal, and Guatemala  to pro-democracy movements that have removed  governments in Bangladesh  and Madagascar,

“People need to have courage to stand up for what they believe and to speak out when their neighbors are persecuted,” Tiwana told IPS. “People still need to continue to speak the truth and come out in the streets in peaceful protest against the injustice that is happening. They should not lose hope.”

On the curtailing of civil society participation in climate change negotiations, Tiwana said the upcoming COP30 in Brazil offered hope. The host government believes in democratic values and including civil society at the table.

“Past COPs have been held in petro states—Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt—which are all authoritarian states where civil society has been attacked, crushed, and persecuted,” he said. “We are hopeful that there will be greater inclusion of voices and the commitments that will be made to reduce emissions will be ambitious but the question is really going to be after the COP and if those commitments will be from governments that really don’t care about civil society demands or about the well-being of their people.”

Young people, Tiwana said, have shown the way. Movements like Fridays for Future  and the Black Lives Matter have demonstrated the power of solidarity and unified action.

But, given the massive protests, has this resistance led to change of a similar scale?

“Unfortunately, we are seeing a rise in military dictatorships around the world,” Tiwana admitted, attributing this to a fraying appetite by the international community to uphold human rights and democratic values.

“Conflict, environmental degradation, extreme wealth accumulation, and high-level corruption are interlinked because it’s people who want to possess more than they need.”

Tiwana illustrated what he means by global priorities.

“We have USD 2.7 trillion in military spending year-on-year nowadays, whereas 700 million people go to bed hungry every night.”

“As civil society, we are trying to expose these corrupt relationships that exist. So the fight for equality, the struggle to create better, more peaceful, more just societies—something CIVICUS supports very much—are some of the conversations that we will be looking to have at the International Civil Society Week.”

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Dr. Luthando Dziba, Executive Secretary, IPBES in conversation with IPS. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Oct 9 2025 (IPS)

Global biodiversity is disappearing at breakneck speed and, in the process, threatening the future of humanity. The loss is not a future threat but a present crisis that Dr. Luthando Dziba, the new Executive Secretary of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), believes can be tackled with science-based policy action.

Dziba assumes his role at a pivotal moment. A landmark IPBES report, launched last December, had a stark warning: biodiversity decline is galloping, whipped by humanity’s disconnect from and dominance of nature, coupled with the inequitable concentration of power and wealth.

So, how does he envision IPBES turning the tide?

“IPBES is not a new platform,” Dziba explained. “It has built a strong tradition of co-producing knowledge with member states. We are now launching our second global biodiversity assessment, alongside critical work on monitoring and spatial planning. This isn’t just about producing reports; it’s about creating a social process for change.”

The “social process” is key to IPBES’s model. Member governments prioritize key biodiversity challenges that IPBES should focus on in its research and participate in the design of the assessments. Through continuous reviews and a collaborative scoping process, there is an integration between science and policy.

Prior to his appointment at IPBES, Dziba had a strong history of working in biodiversity in his native South Africa as well as internationally. He joined the South African National Parks (SANParks) in July 2017 as the Managing Executive for Conservation Services, which oversees Scientific Services, Veterinary Services, Conservation Planning and Cultural Heritage.

Biodiversity loss is accelerating and threatening global food security. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Before joining SANParks, Luthando managed the ecosystem services research area at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), leading a team of more than 50 researchers on biodiversity, ecosystem services, coastal systems, and earth observation.

Dziba has served as the co-chair of the Africa Regional Ecosystem Assessment, commissioned by IPBES and published in 2018. He has been an advisor to South Africa’s delegations at the IPBES plenaries, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Combating Science Skepticism

Beyond the well-documented drivers of biodiversity loss—pollution, unplanned development, and unsustainable consumption—Dziba identifies a greater emerging threat: the credibility of science itself.

“A growing challenge that we are going to have to confront is the question around the credibility of the science that underpins the work of IPBES,” Dziba told IPS in an exclusive interview. “We want to ensure that we continue to produce credible work, policy-relevant work but not policy-prescriptive work, which allows governments to take the knowledge and information that we produce to make policy-relevant decisions.”

Dziba, a veteran conservationist and thought leader, says IPBES has excelled in providing groundbreaking science assessment reports that have informed policy and decision-making on biodiversity conservation.

Established in 2012, IPBES unites over 145 member governments in providing independent, science-based assessments on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Its mission is to deliver credible knowledge that informs policymakers and drives sustainable action.

Dziba identifies key threats, including unchecked human population growth, unplanned development, pollution, and consumption patterns to biodiversity. A critical challenge is maintaining the credibility of scientific work while producing policy-relevant—not policy-prescriptive—knowledge to empower governments to make informed decisions.

The First IPBES Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, launched in 2020, highlighted the need to integrate biodiversity considerations in global decision-making in all sectors because effective biodiversity conservation needed a multifaceted approach. The assessment noted alarming rates of habitat loss, particularly in tropical forests and coral reefs, and stressed that the overarching causes of biodiversity loss are closely linked to human resource use.

An IPBES report, Assessment Report on Invasive Alien Species and their Control, found that more than 37,000 alien species have been introduced by many human activities to regions and biomes around the world. The report found that the global economic cost of invasive alien species exceeded USD 423 billion annually in 2019, with costs having at least quadrupled every decade since 1970.

The solution to global biodiversity loss, Dziba argued, is in transformative, “nexus” approaches that look at issues holistically.

“We need to take a nexus approach and not just tinker at the edges when we are facing problems but rather look at transformative ways of pushing meaningful solutions that bring about change,” he told IPS. “We believe that we will be able to shift towards issues that have an impact not just at a local scale but at a wider scale that are positive for biodiversity and the people.”

When asked how IPBES plans to affect global policy as biodiversity continues to decline, Dziba pointed out that they are currently working on assessments that improve understanding and monitoring related to global biodiversity plans.

“We co-produce knowledge with member states and experts, ensuring our assessments respond directly to policy needs,” he explained.

He stressed IPBES’s agility in tackling emerging challenges, pointing to expert analyses during the COVID pandemic of the links between biodiversity and pandemics, as well as integrating climate change considerations.

Only transformative solutions can reverse biodiversity loss and benefit people globally,” Dziba notes.

Yet there are promising models. He points to a compelling case from rural Senegal, where the scourge of bilharzia was tackled not just as a health issue but through a biodiversity lens. By addressing the pollution and invasive species that allowed the parasitic worms to thrive and using the cleared invasives for livestock feed, communities saw a 32 percent reduction of infection in children and improved livelihoods.

Africa’s conservation successes, such as saving the white rhino and protecting primate habitats through innovative community-based strategies, exemplify effective conservation shaped by combining science and local knowledge.

Dziba emphasizes IPBES’s unique collaborative process: governments engage actively from the outset in designing and reviewing assessments alongside experts, integrating both scientific and indigenous knowledge.

Weaving Local Wisdom

A cornerstone of IPBES’s credibility has been its pioneering effort to embed scientific knowledge with local and indigenous knowledge.

“We make a very deliberative effort to integrate indigenous and local knowledge right from the start,” Dziba said. The platform appoints knowledge holders as experts, holds dialogues, and has a specific taskforce to guide the process. This ensures that the assessments reflect an understanding of how ecosystems function and impact the communities.

Balancing economic development with biodiversity protection is a persistent challenge. While not a policymaker itself, IPBES supports governments by synthesizing evidence on sustainable management and conservation of ecosystems.

Looking ahead to enhancing global collaboration, Dziba said he is committed to strengthening partnerships with UN agencies and conventions such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). These alliances are key to embedding IPBES’s scientific advice into international policy and action.

For Dziba, success during his tenure means delivering timely, high-quality assessments that decisively shape the post-2030 global biodiversity agenda. He also prioritizes securing IPBES’s financial sustainability through innovative funding, including engaging the private sector and philanthropic foundations—a critical strategy amid global economic uncertainty.

“It’s going to take more than just publishing an assessment,” he conceded. “It’s going to take an intentional strategy. Engaging businesses and philanthropies is not just about funding; it’s about recognizing the deep links between biodiversity and sustainable development.”

His ultimate goal is to ensure that when policymakers are asked about what they are doing to protect biodiversity, the answers are informed by the best possible science.

Dziba believes that, with the planet in peril, bridging science and policy is a lifeline to stop biodiversity loss and secure a sustainable future.

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Scientists warn that water risk threatens iconic heritage sites such as the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Sep 3 2025 (IPS)

From Zimbabwe’s ‘The Smoke that thunders,’ Victoria Falls, to the awe-inspiring Pyramids in Egypt and the romantic Taj Mahal in India, these iconic sites are facing a growing threat – water risk.

Several World Heritage sites could be lost forever without urgent action to protect nature, for instance, through the restoration of vital landscapes like wetlands, warns a new report by the World Resources Institute (WRI) following an analysis indicating that droughts and flooding are threatening these sites.

World Heritage sites are places of outstanding universal cultural, historical, scientific, or natural significance, recognized and preserved for future generations through inscription on the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

About 73 percent of the 1,172 non-marine World Heritage sites are exposed to at least one severe water risk, such as drought, flooding, or river or coastal flooding. About 21 percent of the sites face dual problems of too much and too little water, according to an analysis using WRI’s Aqueduct data.

While the global share of World Heritage Sites exposed to high-to-extremely high levels of water stress is projected to rise from 40 percent to 44 percent by 2050, impacts will be far more severe in regions like the Middle East and North Africa, parts of South Asia, and northern China, the report found.

The report highlighted that water risks were threatening many of the more than 1,200 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The Taj Mahal, for example, faces water scarcity that is increasing pollution and depleting groundwater, both of which are damaging the mausoleum. In 2022, a massive flood closed down all of Yellowstone National Park and cost over USD 20 million in infrastructure repairs to reopen.

River Flooding is affecting the desert city of Chan Chan in Peru. According to WRI’s Aqueduct platform, the UNESCO site and its surrounding region in La Libertad face an extremely high risk of river flooding. By 2050, the population affected by floods each year in an average, non-El Niño year in La Libertad is expected to double from 16,000 to 34,000 due to a combination of human activity and climate change. In an El Niño year, that increase may be much higher.

In addition, the biodiversity-rich Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, the sacred city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico, and Morocco’s Medina of Fez are facing growing water risks that are not just endangering the sites but also the millions of people who depend on them for food, livelihoods, or a connection to their culture or who just enjoy traveling to these destinations, the report said.

Straddling the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, the Victoria Falls was inscribed on the World Heritage site in 1989 for its vital ecosystem and essential source of livelihoods for thousands of people, and a major tourism drawcard.

Despite its reputation for massive cascading water, Mosi-oa-Tunya/Victoria Falls has faced recurring drought over the past decade and at times dried up to barely a trickle. The report stated that the rainforest surrounding Mosi-oa-Tunya/Victoria Falls is home to a rich diversity of wildlife and plants.

According to WRI, Victoria Falls experienced droughts as recently as 2016, 2019, and 2024. Research on rainfall patterns near Mosi-oa-Tunya/Victoria Falls shows that the onset of the rainy season, normally in October, is arriving later in the year. That means in a drought year, it takes longer for relief to arrive, and the longer the drought continues, the more it affects the people, crops, and economy around it.

An Aqueduct analysis found that Victoria Falls ranks as a medium drought risk, below the more than 430 UNESCO World Heritage Sites that rank as a high drought risk. This is primarily because relatively low population density and limited human development immediately surrounding the site reduce overall exposure.

“However, the site faces increasing pressure from tourism-related infrastructure development, and data shows the probability of drought occurrence ranks high—a finding reinforced by the many recent droughts that have plagued the region,” said the report. “Climate change is not only expected to make these droughts more frequent, but recovery is expected to last longer, especially in places that aren’t prepared.

“The time between droughts may not be long enough for the ecosystem to recover, which is particularly concerning for Mosi-oa-Tunya/Victoria Falls.”

Restoring nature, a solution to plugging water risks

The report recommends swift action to restore vital landscapes locally that support healthy, stable water and investment in nature-based solutions like planting trees to restore headwater forests or revitalize wetlands to capture floodwaters and recharge aquifers. Political commitment is key to making this happen.

Besides, countries have been urged to enact national conservation policies to protect vital landscapes from unsustainable development globally, and water’s status as a global common good needs to be elevated while equitable transboundary agreements on sharing water across borders are established.

Zimbabwe hosted the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the Ramsar Convention in Victoria Falls under the theme ‘Protecting Wetlands for our Common Future.’ The protection of global water resources is now more urgent.

“You will find the political will to invest in nature exists all over the world,” Samantha Kuzma, Aqueduct Data Lead at the World Resources Institute, told IPS. “Dedicated communities are finding ways to protect and restore vital landscapes like wetlands. The problem is that these efforts are piecemeal. Globally, we are not seeing the political will at the scale needed to achieve real, lasting change.”

The world needs to mobilize up to $7 trillion by 2030 for global water infrastructure to meet water-related SDG commitments and address decades of underinvestment, according to the World Bank. Currently, nearly 91 percent of annual spending on water comes from the public sector, including governments and state-owned enterprises, with less than 2 percent contributed by the private sector, the World Bank says, pointing out the importance of firm commitment to reforming the water sector through progressive policies, institutions, and regulations, and better planning and management of existing capital allocated to the sector.

“We are at the point where inaction is more costly than action,” Kuzma told IPS, emphasizing that the world must do a better job of understanding water’s fundamental role in sustaining economies because its value is everywhere and invisible until it’s at risk.

“Take UNESCO World Heritage Sites, for example. Their ecological and cultural worth is priceless, and in purely pragmatic terms, they’re often the linchpin of local economies,” said Kuzma. “Any closure or damage will send immediate ripple effects through communities. It is safe to say that globally, we are falling short when it comes to protecting nature. But to change course, we must first understand why.”

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Zimbabwe experienced a drought in 2019 and livestock farmers were hit hard. Cattle crossing a dry river in Nkayi District, Nov. 2019. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Aug 20 2025 (IPS)

My family lost six herds of cattle during the devastating El Niño-driven drought that swept Zimbabwe in 2024. The loss was as emotional as it was financial. Guilt gnawed at me.

Drought was nothing new—the past three years had made it painfully clear that I needed to supplement the cows’ feed and ferry water from kilometers away just to keep them alive. But I was fighting a losing battle, desperately trying to sustain emaciated, skeletal animals. Eventually, I had to accept the inevitable: climate change had killed our cattle, and I had been complicit in their suffering.

Have I moved on? Not really. At first, I told myself my distress was an overreaction. After all, countless farmers lost hundreds of livestock and watched their crops wither to nothing. They had suffered more and lost more than I was crying over. Stress, I reasoned, was simply part of the job.

Journalists report on climate change without being personally affected—or so I thought. I was wrong.

Climate change doesn’t just destroy landscapes and livelihoods; it takes a psychological toll on journalists who highlight its horrors.

A groundbreaking study by Dr. Antony Feinstein, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, reveals a hidden crisis: journalists covering the climate crisis are suffering profound emotional and mental health consequences. The research presented during a discussion organized by the Oxford Climate Journalists Network (OCJN) surveyed 268 journalists across 90 countries, spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

The findings are staggering and spoke to me. Forty percent of journalists reported experiencing depression, while one in five exhibited symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), often linked to the “moral injury” of bearing witness to environmental destruction. More than half (55 percent) of the journalists said they lacked access to psychological support, and 16 percent had taken time off work for mental health reasons as a result of covering climate change stories.

The numbers grow even grimmer: nearly half of the journalists surveyed reported moderate to severe anxiety (48%) and depression (42%). Around 22% showed prominent PTSD symptoms. Worse still, 30% had been directly impacted by climate change—losing family, friends, or homes to the crisis. I counted myself in that statistic. I may not have lost a family member, a friend or a home but if cattle count as part of my life, I was affected.

As a journalist reporting on climate change in Zimbabwe—one of the world’s most vulnerable nations—these findings hit close to home. They exposed a fragility I had long dismissed as just part of the job.

Journalists need psychological support. Stigma about mental health runs deep and how do I tell friends and family that I am not okay reporting a story on the impacts of droughts, worse that I have witnessed the loss of six cattle because I could not save them when the drought decimated pastures and dried water supplies? So what? negative events are normal and feeling bad is, I guess, normal too? I have had a lingering question. Surely I can be unsettled by the deaths of cattle and listening to the desperate narratives of farmers about how climate change has upended their lives?

I was depressed, sad, and guilty. I could not do anything to stop cattle dying nor could I pacify farmers in pain. The trauma in covering catastrophe after catastrophe is numbing. Journalists who report on climate change are witnessing a global crisis of our time, and they need support to deliver the news without sacrificing their mental health.

Witnessing tragic events carries a heavy burden for journalists who report on them. I recall covering a story about the impact of drought on livestock farmers in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe’s northern province, where farmers were sharing their staple maize with their cows to keep them alive. Many lost more, some three, five and six cattle between them, but they did give up, though despair was scrawled on their faces. I was shocked and numbed by listening to their sad narrations, but I had to get the story out. I felt hopeless.

Getting a “good” story out of bad experiences means I have to make a tough choice of putting my feelings aside and getting the job done. I have not acknowledged the mental load of witnessing the trauma of covering disasters, yet journalists are supposedly resilient to disturbing news and they soldier on. But no. I have experienced depression at the thought of how people bounce back from personal loss when climate change hits. It is a horror movie that continuously plays in my mind as I go about reporting.

Journalists would benefit from a comprehensive support programme to help them step away from the pressure of being witnesses to catastrophic events. The trauma is beyond comprehension; there is no justification to suffer in silence, especially when mental stress is not talked about in public but endured in private. As a journalist, I have been a victim.

How do I separate myself, my mind and my emotions from the sad stories I cover? I do not have an answer. I am convinced that journalists should tell climate change stories but not be forced to live the reality, although that is almost impossible. Many like me are living the stories they tell with deep scars of mental fatigue and regret.

I believe that newsrooms can offer support in terms of preparing journalists to have the mental agility to report on crises without taking strain from reporting them. Moreover, the impacts of climate change, which is a defining story of the century, affect everyone. Those who say so are at the forefront of agitation, anguish, and hopelessness.

The climate crisis is breaking more than just ecosystems—it’s breaking the journalists who tell its story.

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Rallying call to end TB by 2030. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Jul 15 2025 (IPS)

Every day, Yondela Kolweni has to hold down her son, who screams and fights when it is time for his daily life-saving TB tablets—a painful reminder of her battle with the world’s top infectious killer disease.

“It is a fight I win feeling awful about what I have to do,” says Kolweni (30), a Cape Town resident and a TB survivor. “The tablets are bitter, and he spits them out most of the time, and that reminds me of the time I had to take the same pills.”

Kolweni’s five-year-old son is battling Multidrug Resistant TB (MDR TB), a vicious form of TB that is rising among children globally.

The global burden of MDR-TB among children and adolescents has increased from 1990 to 2019, particularly in regions with lower social and economic development levels, according to a recent study. In addition, the top three highest incidence rates of MDR TB in 2019 were recorded in Southern sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and South Asia, while the top three highest rates of deaths in the same period were recorded in Southern, Central, and Eastern sub-Saharan Africa.

South Africa is one of 30 countries that account for 80 percent of all TB cases in the world and has the most cases of drug-resistant TB.

A Bitter Pill to Swallow

Kolweni’s son was diagnosed with MDR-TB five years ago, having tested positive for TB which has affected his grandmother and his mother. He was immediately on treatment, a drug cocktail that included moxifloxacin—a pill not for the yellow-livered.

“There were two medications he had to take, and there was one specifically, the yellow one, that he did not like, and with the color he knew what it was,” Kolweni told IPS in an interview, explaining a daily battle to get her son to take his meds.

It was down to a fight. She crushed the tablets, mixed them with a bit of water, and fed them through a syringe.

“We would sometimes hold him or wrap a towel around him so that we could feed him the medication, but he would still spit it out, which meant he was not taking the dosage he was meant to take,” said Kolweni. “We then came up with the idea to put his tablets in his yogurt, but that technique did not work because, being a smart kid, he took the bait but would soon spit out the medication.”

Moxifloxacin, an exceptionally bitter medicine, is one of the key drugs in the new all-oral treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB). The treatment is a combination of the drugs Bedaquiline, Pretomanid, Linezolid and Moxifloxacin, known as BPaLM. The BPaLM regimen is specially formulated for children but is a bitter pill to swallow.

Sweet Medicine

But there is sweet hope. A new study, by Stellenbosch University and the TB Alliance, found that sweet, bitter-masked versions of Moxifloxacin significantly improve kids’ willingness to take the drug—easing the burden on parents and boosting treatment adherence.

Two formulations of moxifloxacin have been identified by children as tasting better than new generic versions of products currently on the market.

The results from the ChilPref ML study—a Unitaid-funded effort sponsored and led by Stellenbosch University in collaboration with TB Alliance—will help improve MDR TB treatment and adherence in children.

Dr. Graeme Hoddinott, of Stellenbosch University and the principal investigator of the study, notes that children cannot be treated in a humane manner for drug-resistant TB if the medicines taste so terrible that children refuse them or must be forced to take them.

Children diagnosed with drug-sensitive TB have good outcomes even within the four months because there is usually one tablet given, and there is a child-friendly formulation that dissolves easily to be given on a spoon or in a syringe, Hoddinott said. However, for drug-resistant TB, the situation is complicated. Most drugs for MDR TB are no longer used because of their toxicity and have been replaced by new drugs.

MDR-TB drugs are not child-friendly, Hoddinott admits. The active ingredient that kills TB in Moxifloxacin makes the pills incredibly bad tasting for children who have to take the medication daily for between six and nine months in cases of MDR TB.

“These drugs are incredibly bad tasting; they are genuinely awful to a point where adults who have been on extended TB treatment have been unable to administer the same drugs to their children because the smell evokes the time when they were sick,” Hoddinott told IPS. “It is a trauma to administer such bad-tasting drugs to a child, both for the parent and the child, particularly for the young children.”

The ChilPref study recruited just under 100 healthy children, ages 5–17, from two diverse settings in South Africa. The children evaluated flavor blends using a ‘swish and spit’ taste panel—tasting the medicine, which was dissolved in water, and then spitting it out without ingesting any of it.

Each child participant ranked the flavor blends among the three from each manufacturer and also rated the taste, smell and other characteristics of each. For moxifloxacin, there was a clear, strong preference for the new flavor blends (“bitter masker” and orange for Macleods, and strawberry and raspberry and tutti frutti for Micro Labs) over the existing commercially available flavors for both manufacturers. For Linezolid, there was no preference between the flavor blends.

“Ensuring children have access to effective and palatable TB treatments is a crucial step in improving adherence and treatment outcomes,” said Koteswara Rao Inabathina, one of the study’s authors and CMC Project Manager at TB Alliance.

“Through close collaboration with manufacturers, we have addressed critical unmet needs by developing practical solutions that make available and effective drug-resistant TB treatments not only accessible but also palatable and acceptable for children.”

The results of the ChilPref study showed that children preferred two new flavor blends of moxifloxacin, produced by Macleods Pharmaceuticals, India, and Micro Labs Pharmaceuticals, India. The results were communicated to the manufacturers, who are already updating their products.

“We are not surprised that a lot of kids did not like any of the tastings because we knew that they were horrible taste-wise, but we got a very clear signal for both manufacturers that the flavor blends we recommended were more preferred,” Hoddinott said. “We changed which flavor was going to market with relatively simple research.”

Dr. Cherise Scott, Senior Technical Manager at Unitaid, said the easier it was for children to take their medicines regularly, the more likely they were to complete their treatment successfully.

“We will not allow children to be neglected in global health responses simply because their needs are more complex.”

A Promising Treatment for MDR TB

As multi-drug-resistant TB transmission increases among children and adolescents, the development of new treatments is imperative, Hoddinott explained.

Moxifloxacin may also be increasingly used in the future for the treatment of drug-susceptible TB, which affects an estimated 1.2 million children globally each year.

Drug-resistant TB, has previously been one of the most difficult diseases to manage because of limited child-friendly treatment options, but scientists have made strides in developing new treatments for children, explains Dr. Anthony Garcia-Prats, one of the study authors and an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Now we are making sure that these medicines are appropriate for children, starting with an aspect that children and parents say is critical: taste,” Garcia-Prats said in a statement.

The new treatment is given when TB is either resistant to rifampicin, a critical first-line drug, or rifampicin and isoniazid, another first-line drug combination. These resistant strains are collectively referred to as RR/MDR-TB.

Annually there are an estimated 32,000 new cases of RR/MDR-TB among children 14 years and under—a population that is extremely sensitive to the taste of medicine, according to researchers.

This discovery could help improve adherence to TB medication and move a step closer towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 to end TB by 2030.

“It is not a silver bullet,” Hoddinott cautions. “It does not solve everything, as people affected by TB still face many other challenges, and even the preferred flavor blends still do not taste nice. But, as part of the overall fight against TB in children, it’s an important step.”

Kolweni welcomes the development of masked TB medication.

“My experience with TB medication was not nice, and for children it is worse, and I think flavored tablets would make it easy for children to take, like  Gummies,” she said. “Every child loves flavors; even a suspension would be nice. My son would love it, and I will have no trouble getting him to take his medicine.”

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

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Harriet Okech, a scientist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), briefing visitors to CGIAR Science Week on the work of the IITA. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
NAIROBI, Jul 1 2025 (IPS)

Despite delivering life-saving medicines, more nutritious crops, and transformative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), science remains widely misunderstood, polarizing, and underappreciated. Much of this, experts say, comes down to one persistent issue: poor communication.

Science doesn’t reach the people it’s meant to serve—not because it lacks value, but because it is locked behind technical jargon and inaccessible language. “Science is often misunderstood because it’s poorly communicated,” says Harriet Okech, a biotechnologist on a mission to demystify science and protect it from distortion in an era of rampant misinformation.

Okech, a scientist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Kenya, believes that science must be made understandable and relatable—especially for farmers and policymakers, who are critical in translating research into real-world impact.

“Science should not stay in journals or labs. It must reach the people who need it most,” Okech told IPS.

Keen to improve the accessibility and relevance of its science research to decision-makers, the CGIAR published a report, Insight to Impact: A Decision-Maker’s Guide to Navigating Food System Science, which recognized that the CGIAR’s research was not consistently being used. The report designed for leaders, policymakers and researchers, focuses on translating science into action by simplifying scientific findings into practical, understandable and relevant information with links to tools and real-world applications.

“One of the main barriers is the gap in communication between the scientist and the private sector, including the farmer who is supposed to be the key beneficiary of the materials and innovations the scientists are coming up with,” said Grace Mijiga Mhango, President of the Grain Traders and Processors Association of Malawi, one of several stakeholders consulting in the development of the report.

Commenting on the report, Lindiwe Sibanda, Chair of the CGIAR Integrated Partnership Board, highlighted that policymakers need more support to navigate food systems science.

“The most powerful scaling of agricultural research that I have experienced is through policy, where a policy environment is created in a way that is conducive for CGIAR technologies to be taken up. Yet not all researchers, not all scientists, are comfortable in the science-policy interface. This report marks a step towards bridging this gap.”

Unjamming the Jargon, Plain Speak

To make science relatable, it must first be understandable.

“Scientists and journalists must work together to unpack complex research. Otherwise, the message gets lost—or worse, misinterpreted,” said Okech.

Often, journalists simply reproduce scientific jargon without fully understanding it, leading to confusion and public distrust. “Scientists need to own their narratives and communicate their work clearly—without causing panic or watering it down,” she explained.

Through science communication training programs for researchers and journalists, Okech is helping build this critical skill set.

The biotechnology sector, in particular, has been a frequent casualty of misinformation.

“There’s a lot of fear around biotech because people don’t understand what it is,” Okech noted.

She recalled explaining the basics of GM technology to an Uber driver following Kenya’s decision to lift its ban on genetically modified crops.

“He thought GMOs were just oversized vegetables injected with chemicals. That moment reminded me how important it is to engage beyond the lab.”

Today, Okech writes science-based opinion pieces for the media and creates video content on platforms like YouTube to explain innovations in biotechnology and genome editing in a simple, visual, and engaging way. Her work spans key crops like cassava and ensete—a vital food crop in Ethiopia related to bananas—where she focuses on improving traits for disease resistance and resilience through genetic transformation and gene editing.

As the world works to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), science information must be accessible and inclusive in helping tackle development challenges, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Through its Open Science initiative, UNESCO has championed the need to simplify science communication to promote public understanding and engagement.

Science in Her Cells

Having transitioned from the lab to the front line of science communication, Okech sees herself as a bridge between researchers and the public.

“When I worked in the lab, my dream was to help others understand science, especially those without a scientific background,” she said.

Under the mentorship of Dr. Leena Tripathi—Director of the Eastern Africa Hub and Head of the Biotechnology Program at IITA—Okech has led communications efforts for the institute’s biotechnology and cassava seed systems programs.

Science, for Okech, is more than a career. It is a calling.

“It’s in my DNA,” she chuckled. “But what good is science if no one understands it?”

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Linnet Ochieng, the lab manager, conducts AMR testing at the International Livestock Research Institute. Credit: ILRI

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, May 20 2025 (IPS)

More people are dying from once treatable infections because the medicines we rely on are no longer working as they should. The culprit? A growing health threat called antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

What is AMR?

AMR happens when bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites evolve and become resistant to the drugs meant to kill them—this makes common infections harder and sometimes impossible to treat. Without effective drugs, diseases last longer, spread more easily, and cause more deaths. Why? Antimicrobials are becoming less effective in treating infections because disease-causing germs are becoming resistant.

“AMR is a global crisis that is already here,” Dr. Arshnee Moodley, a microbiologist and team leader for Antimicrobial Resistance at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), told IPS via email.

“It makes infections in people, animals, and even plants harder—or sometimes impossible—to treat,” Moodley says. “Without working medicines, illnesses that were once routine can become life-threatening.”

The rise in AMR has made it more difficult to prevent and treat infections with medicines like antimicrobials.

What are antimicrobials and are they important for health?

Antimicrobials are very important medicines and include antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, and antiparasitics, which are used to either prevent or treat infections in humans, animals, and plants. They are essential to modern medicine and veterinary care. Without them, we risk losing the ability to treat infectious diseases and protect our food systems.

Why is this happening? Should we be worried about AMR?

Imagine not having medicine that works when you get an infection. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the world scrambled to find ways to treat and manage a new disease.

AMR is largely driven by the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials in humans, animals, and agriculture. They are often used when they’re not needed or in the wrong doses. In farming, they are sometimes used to promote growth or make up for poor hygiene rather than treat disease. This overuse gives microbes more chances to adapt and become resistant, turning these life-saving medicines into useless tools.

The World Bank, the World Organisation for Animal Health, and AMR all warn that without action, AMR could cause significant economic harm on the scale of the 2008 global financial crisis. The World Bank estimates that by 2050, AMR could wipe away 3.8 percent of global gross domestic product each year and push 28 million people into poverty. The loss of productivity in agriculture, especially livestock systems, could severely affect food systems and livelihoods.

Who is most affected?

While AMR is a global burden, low- and middle-income countries like Kenya bear the greatest burden. Limited access to diagnostics, vaccines, and appropriate treatment means that drug-resistant infections often go undetected or are treated incorrectly. Farmers can lose entire herds or flocks due to untreatable infections, leading to food insecurity and loss of income. According to recent estimates, AMR directly causes 1.27 million deaths annually and contributes to nearly 5 million more. That’s on par with HIV/AIDS and malaria.

Researchers at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) use waste bins to collect empty containers, packaging, and used vials as a simple and effective way to monitor what antimicrobials are used on farms. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Does climate change have a role in AMR?

Yes, climate change is an emerging factor in the spread and worsening of AMR. Rising temperatures, extreme weather, and flooding can alter the spread of pathogens and the application of antimicrobials, according to a recent review in which ILRI participated. For example, warmer conditions help bacteria grow faster and share resistance genes more easily. Floods can spread drug-resistant pathogens from sewage into water supplies, increasing the risk of infections in both people and animals. Animals stressed by heat may become more vulnerable to disease, leading to increased use of antimicrobials.

“There is also another link between AMR and climate change,” Moodley told IPS. “Residues of antimicrobials in manure can disrupt microbial processes in soil, potentially affecting greenhouse gas emissions. And we at ILRI are studying how antibiotics in livestock manure—because of treatment—affect greenhouse gas emissions and soil health.”

Can we fight AMR?

Yes. AMR is preventable, but it requires urgent action across all sectors. Vaccination can prevent infections and reduce the need for antibiotics. Improved diagnostics can ensure the right drug is used only when necessary. Better hygiene and infection prevention in hospitals, farms, and communities can reduce disease spread. Responsible antimicrobial use in both animals and humans is key to slowing AMR.

“While drug-resistant infections are a concern,” Moodley says, “We must not forget that many people still don’t have access to the basic health and veterinary services they need—including the very medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics that could save lives and prevent AMR.”

The bottom line

AMR threatens the future of healthcare, agriculture, and global development. It undermines progress toward Universal Health Coverage and Sustainable Development Goals like zero hunger (SDG 2) and good health and well-being (SDG 3). This silent pandemic is unfolding now and without urgent, coordinated action, the world risks entering a post-antibiotic era where even the smallest infections can once again kill.

Note: This feature is published with the support of Open Society Foundations.

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Dr. Nicholas Svitek, microbiologist and senior scientist at ILRI’s Health Program and Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health and Dr. Elise Schieck, a senior scientist at ILRI. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
NAIROBI, Apr 22 2025 (IPS)

Livestock are a lifeline for millions of farmers in Africa as a source of food and wealth. But devastating diseases are threatening the health and productivity of their animals.

Now scientists at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) have unleashed a toolbox of science solutions by outsmarting the parasites and pathogens that cost millions of dollars in livestock losses across Africa. The toolbox includes everything from vaccines that protect livestock from ‘cattle malaria’ to genetics to breed animals tolerant to East Coast fever.

East Coast fever is wiping out cattle herds across Africa, triggering income losses and food insecurity. Transmitted by ticks, East Coast fever (ECF) kills over a million cattle each year, with young calves especially at risk, says Dr. Nicholas Svitek, a microbiologist and senior scientist at ILRI’s Health Program and Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health (CTLGH).

Caused by a parasite called Theileria parva, ECF can be likened to the cattle version of malaria. It is caused by a parasite closely related to the one that affects humans, Plasmodium sp.

“ECF claims the lives of more than one million cattle every year—about one head of cattle every thirty seconds,” said Svitek, adding that the disease causes more than US$500 million in economic losses annually.

Science to the Rescue
Through a strategic partnership between the Roslin Institute, Scotland Rural College, and ILRI, CTLGH is developing genetic solutions to improve livestock-based livelihoods by studying the resistance of African indigenous cattle to ECF.

Svitek said scientists have identified a genetic marker, that is, a specific mutation in a gene called FAF1B associated with resistance to the ECF-causing parasite.

“We are currently studying the mechanism to confirm what the role of this gene is in the resistance to the disease,” said Svitek. “This study is quite a breakthrough not only to understand the biology of the parasite but, most importantly, how we can use this information for breeding programs to select animals that have this genetic marker so we can breed them, so by selecting these animals we can improve the health and overall productivity of the animals.”

ILRI has created experimental vaccines using artificial intelligence and genetically modified viruses to help cattle build immunity against the Theileria parva parasite.

The Institute has also developed experimental vaccines against the bacterial pathogen causing Contagious Caprine Pleuropneumonia (CCPP), Mycoplasma capricolum, a highly contagious respiratory disease in goats and the bacterial pathogen causing Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia (CBPP), Mycoplasma mycoides, which affects cattle.

Svitek and Dr. Hussein Abkallo, a molecular biology scientist, have been part of the groundbreaking use of the CRISPR-Cas technology to genetically engineer the African swine fever virus using weakened viruses as a vaccination strategy. CRISPR-Cas is the “genetic scissors” scientists use to edit DNA—the instruction manual inside every living cell—that causes disease.

Healthy Herds, Happy Farmers
ILRI’s science solutions will result in increased animal productivity due to better health and fewer deaths. Besides, scientists are now able to better screen cattle that are more resilient to common infections while reducing the reliance on costly antibiotics in treating sick animals.

Dr. Anna Lacasta, a senior scientist at ILRI focusing on animal health, said they are developing effective vaccines for developing countries. Dr. Svitek and his team have developed the first rapid test prototype using the CRISPR-Cas technology for diagnosing ECF in the field.

Livestock is a lifeline for farmers in Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“ECF causes malaria but for cattle so it is a tricky disease to develop a vaccine for, as it is for malaria in people,” said Lacasta, who has led the vaccine development research on East Coast fever and African swine fever (ASF)—two important livestock diseases currently endemic in low- and middle-income countries.

ASF is a devastating disease affecting pig production in developing countries; current control methods, such as culling affected animals and using biosecurity in containing the disease, are inadequate.

ILRI has developed live attenuated vaccines (LAV) for ASF genotypes circulating in East Africa with promising results.

Research is ongoing on the Contagious Caprine Pleuropneumonia (CCPP), a severe, highly contagious mycoplasmal respiratory disease primarily affecting goats and sheep, as is the Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia (CBPP) in cattle.

“Diseases such as CCPP and CBPP are considered neglected because they affect animals in Africa. The diseases were eradicated in Europe, America, and Australia, but we still have the CCPP in Asia and CBPP in Africa,” said Dr. Elise Schieck, a senior scientist at ILRI, noting that the different vaccines were being evaluated for effectiveness.

Despite the development and use of various science solutions to tackling livestock diseases, there are limitations to their success. Access to vaccines and diagnostic tools is a challenge for farmers across Africa, especially where cold storage facilities are needed to keep the vaccines. Besides, limited extension and advisory services have also hindered farmers from taking up the innovations.

With the right partnerships and policies, science-led livestock health innovations can boost agricultural growth in Africa.

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Dr Ismahane Elouafi, Executive Managing Director of CGIAR. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Cecilia Russell and Busani Bafana
NAIROBI, Apr 11 2025 (IPS)

This week presented a beacon of hope for young people so that the “girl from the South and the boy, of course” could stay in the developing world, Dr Ismahane Elouafi, Executive Managing Director of CGIAR, said during a press conference on the final day of the CGIAR Science Week.

Science and innovation could whet their appetites, especially as research and innovation can change the perception that it is a drudgery-filled occupation to one where there is room for ambition – and it made business sense.

“In the face of slow productivity and rising risks, the case is clear. Investing in agricultural research is one of the smartest and most future-proof decisions that anyone can make,” she said.

Elouafi, along with the other panellists Dr Eliud Kiplimo Kireger, the Director General of KALRO and Eluid Rugut, a youth agri-champion at the Ban Ki-moon Centre, alluded to the broad value chain of agriculture, which will make it attractive to young people.

Dr Eliud Kiplimo Kireger, the Director General of KALRO. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Kireger commented that people say, “Agriculture is not sexy, and so we need to make it sexy,” and encourage young people into science. Apart from encouraging young kids into science, there was a space in it for young people who don’t want to see returns on their investments in years but in months.

Rugut’s personal experience backs the claim up; he told the press conference that he first had to convince his father to give him a little land – and this wasn’t an easy task. Rugut, who represents both the youth and a smallholder, said it was only once his father saw the benefits of the new technologies that he was prepared to give his son the benefit of the doubt.

“It was very hard to convince my dad to give us land, but over time, these technologies that I was trying to bring to the farm – like drip irrigation, water pumps and drought-tolerant seeds,” Rugut said, but in the end, “I was able to convince him. Also, my mom was able to convince him.”

Kireger said the week-long conference had shown the power of collaboration, especially because research was expensive and the need was great. However, digitisation had meant that a lot of the research was no longer stuck in the labs and was now in the hands of farmers.

Eluid Rugut, a youth agri-champion at the Ban Ki-Moon Centre. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

He encouraged farmers (and the journalists at the conference) to take a look at the Google Play store, where there are KALRO apps.

“So, if you go to Google Play Store, you will find many KALRO apps which you can download onto your phone. So, if you’re a coffee farmer, for example, you can download a guide on your phone.”

This digitisation is key to scaling research and making it accessible.

Elouafi, too, said investment in agribusiness was crucial to transforming the sector There was a need for public-private partnerships so farmers were no longer only involved in production but down the value chain too.

“So strategic investment in agricultural research isn’t just necessary; it is economically smart. We have seen a USD 10 return on every dollar spent on research and development in the agriculture sector.”

She provided several examples. Participating in the value chain could transform USD 300 of wheat into USD 3000 through pasta production. Likewise with quinoa, millet and sorghum, which cost USD 4 in the market, with production, can fetch USD 50 to USD 100 per kilogram in the market.

This opportunity is where policies and subsidies come in, to put this potential into the hands of the farmers. “This is a gap we need to bridge,” Elouafi said.

Elouafi reported significant progress this week, particularly in addressing food insecurity. The achievements included the launch of the CGIAR research portfolio, the International Potato Centre (CIP) and KALRO biotech agreement, the IWMI water security strategy for East Africa, and the publication of CGIAR’s flagship report, Insight to Impact: A decision-maker’s guide to navigating food system science.

“Science week  has demonstrated the strength of partnerships. How together we can generate powerful tools, innovation, technologies, knowledge, institutions, policies – all of it – to deliver real-world impact for the communities that we serve.

“In the era of fake news and misinformation, our work, our impact, our partnership, and our commitment to the communities we serve are real, and our impact is real, and we need to have a much louder voice. We cannot let it up because the gap will be filled by misinformation.”

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Professor Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CGIAR partnerships chair. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
NAIROBI, Apr 10 2025 (IPS)

Animal scientist Lindiwe Majele Sibanda became what her grandmother earnestly prayed for when she was growing up on a farm in southern Zimbabwe.

Majele Sibanda, an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria  and chair of CGIAR’s Integrated Partnership Board, is a practicing livestock farmer and a successful one at that. She is raising pedigree and indigenous cattle as well as hardy Matabele goats.

“Livestock is livelihood,” Majele Sibanda says, speaking to IPS at CGIAR Science Week, responding to the growing concerns about livestock farming as an environmental threat.

Livestock production supports more than 1.3 billion people globally in terms of food and nutrition security. Africa has an estimated 800 million livestock keepers in a sector that contributes up to 50 percent of agricultural GDP and supports the livelihoods of about 350 million people.

There is a flipside, though. The livestock sector is currently responsible for up to 20 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, underlying the need for more efficient and sustainable livestock production systems.

Aspire to a ‘Protein Revolution’

“The biggest revolution we have to aspire to is the protein revolution, and the revolution will not be achieved without animal-source foods like milk, blood, and meat,” says Majele Sibanda. “We cannot achieve it with plant-based nutrition alone. I believe in livestock — but livestock that is produced sustainably.”

Livestock are both a solution and a challenge but will remain an essential part of the food system. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Livestock has economic and social attributes that act as a store of value for farmers. Livestock farmers in Africa produce half of the continent’s meat and milk. Milk secures the nutritional needs of children, aiding in their development, while assorted livestock products contribute to income generation as they are traded, with meat, milk, and eggs being prominent commodities. Besides food, livestock provides non-food products like leather, wool, and pharmaceuticals.

Majele Sibanda is a champion for the International Livestock Research Institute Strategy, which is looking at sustainable livestock production systems.

In 2024, ILRI launched a new strategy, ‘Unlocking sustainable livestock’s potential through research for better lives and a better planet,’ to guide its programs in the next five years to 2030.

The strategy addresses global challenges such as climate change, food insecurity, and sustainable development. It aims to improve livestock systems in Africa and Asia through the implementation of large-scale, science-based sustainable livestock solutions that influence policy decisions and investments.

Science Drives Development

A distinguished leader and policy advocate on food systems, Majele Sibanda is convinced scientific research can enhance agriculture as a driver of development.

“With science, we can feed the world of 9.7 billion by 2050,” said Majele Sibanda, who has the privilege of being a farmer, a businessperson, and a jury member  for the Food Planet Prize, the world’s biggest prize in the sector.

“Technology on the shelf is not good enough,” she emphasized. “Technology on the ground takes drivers—it has to be conveyed. Scaling up requires policies. We talk about it as a science but let us talk about it as a multi-stakeholder agenda of moving science to the people who need it most. There can be no better base than doing it on-site together—from agenda setting to the users.”

Farmers Are Scientists, Custodians of Knowledge

But is it possible for farmers to adopt scientific innovations without abandoning the indigenous know-how of farming, which has supported them for generations?

Majele Sibanda believes so.

“Farmers are not stupid,” she retorts. “Farmers are scientists. You cannot farm without knowledge. They are custodians of knowledge and are continuously learning, whether they have gone to school for it or suckled it from their grandmother, like me and my father, who is still an active farmer or from their neighbors.”

She said farmers are continuously on a quest for new ways to improve both their land and animals.

“The beauty of science is that you have a dedicated group of persons whose core business is to generate their knowledge. That knowledge is for improving productivity in a sustainable way,” Majele Sibanda said, adding, “This rift between a farmer and a scientist does not and should not exist provided there is humility to accept that as a scientist you are learning and as a farmer you are learning. We have a common goal of sustainable production and sustainable food systems—feeding the soil, feeding the family, and feeding the pocket. We have a common goal of sustainable production and sustainable food systems.”

“If researchers understand the aspirations of farmers, they will be able to meet them halfway with the right technologies. The challenge we have had is that researchers want an easy way out at times and want to put all technologies on the shelf and do not want to invest in a local system that helps farmers adapt.”

Majele Sibanda highlights the importance of partnerships between the CGIAR and the national research systems in the provision and sharing of innovative technologies that enable farmers to adapt as well as mitigate the impacts of climate change.

“Unless we walk hand in hand, research technologies and innovations will sit on the shelf,” she said.

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Crucial partnerships agreed to during CGIAR Science Week.

By Busani Bafana
NAIROBI, Apr 9 2025 (IPS)

Two crucial partnerships were signed at the CGIAR Science Week in Nairobi today (April 9, 2025), aimed at delivering research for development at scale across Africa.

The CGIAR and the African Agricultural Research, Innovation, and Education Institutions (AARIEIs) signed a Joint Statement in support of the Kampala CAADP Declaration and the CAADP Strategy and Action Plan (2026-2035). In January 2025, the African Union (AU) adopted a new agricultural development strategy that will see the continent increase its agrifood output by 45 percent by 2035 and transform its agrifood systems as part of its new plan to become food secure in a decade. During the signing ceremony, the organizations pledged to forge a partnership that would harness the power of collaboration to deliver research at scale.
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King of the crops, Simeon Ehui, IITA Director General, holding a cassava tuber, a key crop developed by the IITA. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
NAIROBI, Apr 9 2025 (IPS)

Climate change is outpacing science and farmers are paying the price. Agricultural research innovations need to reach farmers before it is too late.

Partnership, collaborations, and the right dose of political will are the fuel to put innovations into the farmer’s hands, says Simeon Ehui, Director General of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and CGIAR Regional Director, Continental Africa. The IITA has delivered solutions to low crop yields, poor quality, and unhealthy diet to boost food security, nutrition, and livelihoods for smallholder farmers who keep the world fed.

“We have developed a number of technologies; unfortunately, many of these technologies are not always going to farmers, the final users,” said Ehui, adding that with political will, innovation can be rolled out faster and wider.

“Policy makers understand the importance of science but face competing needs and sometimes need to make decisions that will not always go in the interest of farmers. We need to continue lobbying them to convince them of the importance of science.”

Ehui told IPS that the IITA has tackled food insecurity, poverty, and environmental degradation through cutting-edge research on key crops  like maize, banana, cowpea, soybean, cassava, and yam. With global hunger rising despite scientific advances, the question is, why are innovations not reaching farmers fast enough?

“While scientific breakthroughs are abundant, the real gap lies in delivery—getting these innovations into the hands of farmers at scale,” Ehui noted, citing that many countries still face weak extension systems, fragmented value chains, and limited private sector engagement.

IITA has bridged this gap through initiatives like the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) program, in partnership with the African Development Bank. TAAT has helped move proven technologies across priority value chains from research to farmers via CGIAR centers, governments, private sector actors, and financial institutions.

“It’s not just about deploying technologies; it’s about building systems for scale—streamlining release processes, aligning with policy, and expanding access to inputs and markets, especially for women and youth,” said Ehui.

Ehui quipped he had three messages for policymakers. “You need science to develop your agricultural productivity. You need investments in rural infrastructure, and you also need partnerships. Without partnerships, nothing can be done.”

Seeds for food security. Seed varieties from the IITA Gene bank. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Revolutionary breakthroughs

The science research institute has put out more nutritious, climate-resistant crops, which have helped fight hunger and boost the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Africa. It developed and released stress-resilient maize varieties that are both drought and Striga resistant and more nutritious. More than 170 maize varieties have been released between 2007 and 2024 in collaboration with IITA and national partners in Benin, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria.

As a result of the research innovation, more than  480,000 metric tons of certified seed have been produced, which have been planted on an estimated 18 million hectares by 45 million households. Well over 500 million people have benefited from the improved maize crop.

Banana breeding programs have developed hybrids with enhanced resistance to the fungal diseases Fusarium wilt and Black Sigatoka, which can wipe out banana crops.

Ehui said IITA has also developed early-maturing, disease-resistant yam and cassava varieties, alongside digital tools like AKILIMO, which support farmers in optimizing agronomic practices and fertilizer use.

“We have also developed an economically sustainable seed system for root and tuber crops, powered by innovative rapid multiplication techniques,” he said, pointing out that the rapid stem multiplication approach has enabled the fast and efficient scaling of improved varieties to growers and the processing industry.

The science is progression; now it’s crucial farmers benefit, Ehui says.

“The IITA and CGIAR centers have to work with governments to ensure that technologies are taken up and we modernize the agriculture sector. This is the challenge we face because having research products in our labs does not help if they are never taken up by end users. The agricultural revolution is not in the lab but outside (in the real world). The lab is needed—the lab is not the end point.”

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Panellists from the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) at the launch of the IWMI Strategy 2024–2030 in East Africa. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
NAIROBI, Apr 9 2025 (IPS)

In East Africa, climate change has made water a lifeline and threat.

In a region highly dependent on rainfall for growing crops, climate change is threatening water security but science-backed solutions are helping turn the tide.

Global leaders, scientists, policymakers, and development partners meeting in Nairobi during the inaugural CGIAR Science Week  made a tight case for water security and productivity in East Africa, a region vulnerable to the increased impacts of climate change such as droughts and floods.

The use, conservation and management of water underpins sustainable development of the East Africa region, which covers Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.

“Water security means considering how much water you have, water of sufficient quality and being  able to manage risks – drought, floods, extreme events – in ways that livelihoods and lives, the economy and ecosystems can all thrive together,” said Mark Smith, Director General of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), at the launch of the IWMI Strategy 2024–2030 in East Africa.

Smith noted that the new strategy was a significant leap forward in the institute’s mission to harness science research in enhancing water security, supporting climate adaptation and driving sustainable agriculture across East Africa.

“Water security  is necessarily systemic and our strategy reflects that,” he said. “There is a  flipside to that aspect of water in which it intersects with different types of uses. If you can get water security right, then you can  trigger transformation across those systems as you open access to water and enable more  sustainable and fairer sharing of water across different uses.”

Mark Smith, Director General of the International Water Management Institute. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By harnessing  cutting-edge research and fostering regional partnerships, IWMI aims to deliver solutions that improve livelihoods across East Africa.

“Water security is important for the transformation of agriculture and for sustainable development,” he said, adding that, “Water is at the heart of climate resilience, food security and economic development.”

Sara Mbago-Bhunu,  Director of the East and Southern Africa Division of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), highlighting the importance of collaboration in enhancing water security,  called for continued public and private financing for the water sector, particularly to benefit small-scale farmers through irrigation facilities.

IFAD has invested USD 2 billion in irrigation and water management in 100 projects worldwide, while in East Africa it has supported 14 projects in 12 countries. Mbago-Bhunu said it was critical to invest in water accounting.

“We tend to underestimate what water accounting is  and irrigation performance assessment translated into how we source water, how we manage it but also how we account for it because accounting  will give us further breakthroughs to where we should change in the way we invest in water technologies,” she said.

Ephantus Kimoto, Principal Secretary in the Department for Irrigation in the Ministry of Water, Sanitation and Irrigation of Kenya. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Ephantus Kimoto, Principal Secretary in the Department for Irrigation in the Ministry of Water, sanitation and Irrigation of Kenya,  said the government was working to boost irrigation capacity in the country. Currently only four percent of Kenya’s arable land was under irrigation under the National Irrigation Sector Investment Master Plan (NISIP); there is irrigation potential of 3.5  million acres in the country.

Kimoto noted that Kenya had enough water resources but lacked the economic means to scale up irrigation projects. Under the national plan, Kenya seeks to increase the land under irrigation up to 1 million acres and boost food productivity and job creation, especially among the youth.

A panel discussion hosted alongside the launch of the IWMI strategy noted the importance of collaboration in the management of water resources in East Africa while at the same time scaling up innovation and research.

For farmers, saving water is everything.

“Water is a scarce resource and we need to  guard it well, “ said Elizabeth Nsimadala, President, Eastern Africa Farmers Federation.

“We are seeing a lot of water wasted and what is missing is the science bit. When you look at wasted water when it comes to irrigation, there is a lot and this directly affects the output. What is also a missing from our end as farmers is how much quantity does this crop require, as different crops require different quantities of water.”

Nsimadala – a coffee farmer – said policy, infrastructure, sustainability, access and management were priority issues for farmers in terms of water use. She called for the provision of water-saving technologies for farmers because of the competing water uses that have been worsened by the impact of climate change.

While Yelvin Denje, a research fellow with the African Group of Negotiators Experts Support

(AGNES) said the interface between science and policy has led to improvements in equitable access and unlocked the potential for water and development on the continent but it was hard to measure the effectiveness of policies.

“There are now in many African countries water regulations, acts and water laws,” he said, citing the Africa Water Vision for 2025.

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Travelling across Africa is hard for Africans owing to restrictive visas. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Jan 23 2025 (IPS)

Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, carries his frustration as visibly as he carries his passport.

To travel across the continent he calls home, he needs 35 visas—each a bureaucratic hurdle and a reminder of the barriers to free movement and trade in Africa.

“As someone who wants to make Africa great, I have to apply for 35 different visas,” Dangote lamented at a recent Africa CEO Forum in Kigali, Rwanda. His words echo the larger frustration of a continent grappling with the paradox of cementing regional integration while battling closed borders.

Nearly a decade after African leaders envisioned a borderless continent, the dream is largely unfulfilled.

Visa Woes

The 2024 Africa Visa Openness Index, launched recently in Botswana, is revealing: only four countries—Benin, The Gambia, Rwanda, and Seychelles—offer visa-free access to all Africans. Ghana has joined the list after it announced visa-free travel to all Africans in January this year.

Published by the African Development Bank and the African Union, the visa-openness index measures how open African countries are to citizens of other African countries based on whether or not a visa is required before travel and if it can be issued on arrival. There has been some progress since the first edition of the report, with several African countries instituting reforms to simplify the free movement of people across the continent.

About 17 African countries have improved on their visa openness, while 29 are instituting reforms on the issuance of visas for Africans, the Index shows. In 28 percent of country-to-country travel scenarios within Africa, African citizens do not need a visa to cross the border, a marked improvement over 20% in 2016

However, the cost of inaction is clear. Intra-Africa trade is at a low 15 percent of total trade, compared to 60 percent in Asia and 70 percent in Europe, according to research by the Economic Commission for Africa. Visa openness could boost intra-Africa trade and tourism while facilitating labour mobility and skills transfer and propel Africa to economic growth. For now, closed borders remain Africa’s stop sign to free movement.

Zodwa Mabuza, Principal Regional Integration Officer at the AFDB, noted during the launch of the 2024 Index on the sidelines of the 2024 Africa Economic Conference that visa openness was not about permanent migration but the facilitation of tourism, trade and investments.

“This is the sort of movement that we are promoting, in particular because we are promoting the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA),” Mabuza said.

Stop In the Name of Crime

Fears of illegal migration, terrorism, and economic disruption keep borders closed, despite evidence that such fears are often overblown, said Francis Ikome, Chief Regional Integration and Trade at the Economic Commission for Africa.

Ikome warned that without free movement of African people across the continent, AfCFTA is ‘dead on arrival’.

“We cannot discuss the concerns of security again, even though I think there is over-securitization of migration. When we talk about migration, we see security,” said Ikome. “When you are a foreigner and an African moves to the immigration officer, they see problems even before they look at your passport. Migrants are job creators; there are a lot of university dons, accountants and other skills that migrants bring to the table.”

Free Passage Paradox

Since the launch of the AfCFTA, a majority of African countries have not ratified the Free Movement of Persons Protocol launched in 2018 by the African Union and signed by 33 member states. Only four countries have ratified the Protocol.

Migration researcher Alan Hirsch highlighted that some richer African countries are more protective of their borders and several of the most open countries are island states or poor countries that do not expect immigration or can control it more easily. He said trust is needed between countries, which takes time and effort.

“The reluctance of some countries is related to their concerns about the quality of documentation and systems in some countries, fears relating to security issues as there are terrorist organisations in some parts of Africa, and fears that the visitors are economic migrants in disguise and will not leave,” Hirsch told IPS.

“There is a lot of progress in the regional communities in Africa. Borders are opening frequently on a bilateral or multilateral basis, as the visa openness index shows,” said Hirsch, an Emeritus Professor at The Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town.

Sabelo Mbokazi, Head of Employment, Labour and Migration at the African Union Commission, suggests that countries that promote free movement must be incentivised to do better.

“Who are we serving with all these visa restrictions? Are we serving the people or the politics of the day? Are we serving populations or our popularity? Are we serving the people around the continent or for profit? These are the paradoxes we see in Africa,” he said, citing that intra-African migration was at 80 percent, with 20 percent going to Europe or America but Europeans who came to Africa moved more easily than Africans.

That some Africans do not have passports and some are nomads, visa-free travel could be a logistical nightmare that many countries would do without. Africa has toyed with the concept of an African passport, which was launched in 2016. The passport has been issued only to African heads of state, foreign ministers and diplomats accredited by the AU.

“Regional passports, such as the ECOWAS passport for the large West African community and the EAC passport for the growing East African community, were developed in recent times and are doing very well. It was probably too soon for an all-African passport, “ Hirsch said.

In analysis, stopping African travellers in their tracks is counter to regional integration aspirations, argues Joy Kategekwa, Director, Regional Integration Coordination Office, at the AfDB.

“The paradox of integration in Africa is we talk about pan-Africanism; we have a passion for it but we keep Africans closed out of it behind the visa.”

Tied to the free movement of persons has been the poor implementation of the Yamoussoukro Decision to liberalize air transport. Air connectivity in Africa is a nightmare.

Hirsch is optimistic that Africa can boost its development through trade and migration, admitting that opening African skies takes time.

“In addition to the African ‘free skies’ initiative and the free movement of persons protocol, there is the AfCFTA,” he said. “All three initiatives were agreed to in 2018. The AfCFTA is making some progress and could help pave the way for the other two initiatives.”

The stakes are high. The AfCFTA, meant to unite 1.3 billion people under a single market, risks failure. With closed borders and skies, a visa-free Africa is a dream deferred.

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Hardy, nutrition-rich indigenous crops such as sorghum should be esearched as innovative solutions to ending hunger and malnutrition. More than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize Laureates call on world leaders to prioritize urgent agricultural research to meet food needs of 9.7 billion people by 2050. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Jan 14 2025 (IPS)

Neglected indigenous crops, rich in nutrition and resilient to climate change, are key to tackling global hunger only if governments invest in research and development (R&D) to tap the potential of such innovations.

More than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize Laureates are calling for investment in moonshot technologies to realize the potential of innovative solutions such as these hardy crops, warning that without swift action, there is a “food insecure, unstable world.”

Neglected crops are indigenous crops that have been lost or forgotten over time. They are important for the food security of resource-poor farmers and consumers, especially in Africa.

In an open letter to the “Agricultural R&D Moonshot: Bolstering U.S. National Security” meeting in the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture in Washington, DC, this week, the Laureates called on world leaders to prioritize urgent agricultural research to meet the food needs of nearly 10 billion people by mid-century. They urged for financial and political support to develop “moonshot” technologies with the greatest chance of averting a hunger catastrophe in the next 25 years.

“The most promising scientific breakthroughs and emerging fields of research that should be prioritized to boost food production include research into hardy, nutrition-rich indigenous crops that have been largely overlooked for improvements,” the Laureates of the Nobel Prize and the World Food Prize said, citing other moonshot technology candidates as improving photosynthesis in staple crops such as wheat and rice to optimize growth and developing cereals that can source nitrogen biologically and grow without fertilizer.

“The scale of ambition and research we are advocating will require mechanisms to identify, recommend, coordinate, monitor and facilitate collaborative implementation of the proposed food security moonshots,” the Laureates said, in advocating for research investment to ensure the world’s future food and nutrition security.

Research to Rid the World of Hunger

While agricultural research had favourable returns on investment, the Laureates bemoaned that it was failing to provide people in developing countries with a nutritious diet in a resilient, environmentally sustainable, and cost-effective manner. The Laureates are convinced that improving agricultural productivity will be enough to meet the world’s future food needs but caution that if we do not prioritize agricultural R&D the global farming systems will be tied to the increased use of diminishing non-replenishable resources to feed humanity.

More than 150 Nobel and World Food Prize laureates call for urgent “moonshot” efforts to avert global hunger catastrophe. Credit: World Food Prize Foundation

The world was “not even close” to meeting future food needs, with an estimated 700 million people already going hungry and an additional 1.5 billion people needing to be fed by 2050, the Laureates said, urging for the transformation of the global food value chain.

Other moonshot initiatives that should be researched include the enhancement of fruits and vegetables to improve storage and shelf life and to increase food safety, and the creation of nutrient-rich food from microorganisms and fungi.

In 2007, African Union member countries pledged to invest one percent of their GDP by 2020 in science and research, an ambitious bid for science-led development but a goal many countries have failed to meet.

Science, technology and innovation have been identified as key to Africa’s development under the Africa Agenda 2063—a development roadmap for the next fifty years adopted by African Heads of State.

Climate Change Affecting Food Security

Climate change is projected to decrease the productivity of most major staples when substantial increases are needed to feed a world, which will add another 1.5 billion people to its population by 2050.

For maize, the major staple for much of Africa, the picture is particularly dire, with decreasing yields projected for virtually its entire growing area. Increasingly common extreme weather events associated with climate change will only make matters worse. Moreover, additional factors such as soil erosion and land degradation, biodiversity loss, water shortages, conflict, and policies that restrict innovation will drag crop productivity down even further.

“Yet as difficult and as uncomfortable as it might be to imagine, humanity is headed towards an even more food insecure, unstable world by mid-century than exists today, worsened by a vicious cycle of conflict and food insecurity,” said the Laureates, who include Robert Woodrow Wilson, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery that supported the big bang theory of creation and Wole Soyinka, the first Black African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“The impacts of climate change are already reducing food production around the world, but particularly in Africa, which bears little historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions yet sees temperatures rising faster than elsewhere,” Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, who received the World Food Prize in 2017, said in a statement. “In low-income countries where productivity needs to almost double by 2050 compared to 1990, the stark reality is that it’s likely to rise by less than half. We have just 25 years to change this.”

Other notable signatories to the letter include the 14th Dalai Lama., Ethiopian-American plant breeder and U.S. National Media of Science recipient Gebisa Ejeta, Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank and Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food Prize Laureate, who is also the outgoing U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security who coordinated the appeal.

“We must take bold action to change course,” said the Laureates, adding, “We must be prepared to pursue high-risk, high-reward scientific research with the goal of transforming our food systems to meet the nutritional needs of everyone sustainably.”

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Malagasy woman preparing fish on the beach of Lavanono in the far south of Madagascar. The IPBES Transformative Change Report suggests that principles of equity and justice; pluralism and inclusion; respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships; and adaptive learning and action can achieve transformative change.

By Busani Bafana
WINDHOEK, Dec 19 2024 (IPS)

Nature is at a tipping point. With human activity having pushed up to 1 million plant and animal species close to extinction, securing sustainable development and halting global biodiversity collapse is no longer just an option but a requisite for human wellbeing.

A new report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) clarifies that only transformative change can reverse the biodiversity crisis and reset humanity’s relationship with nature for just and sustainable futures.

The IPBES Assessment Report on the Underlying Causes of Biodiversity Loss and the Determinants of Transformative Change and Options for Achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity, also known as the Transformative Change Report, launched this week during the 11th IPBES Plenary session being held in Namibia, has a stark warning: biodiversity decline is galloping ahead, whipped up by humanity’s disconnect from and dominance over nature, coupled with the inequitable concentration of power and wealth. The prioritization of short-term individual and material gains, the report argues, has also led to the destruction of the fabric of life.

Change and Act Now

The report highlights the need for addressing biodiversity loss through what the authors describe as transformative change—fundamental systemwide shifts in views, including ways of thinking, knowing, and seeing; structures, such as ways of organizing, regulating, and governing; and practices, including ways of doing, behaving, and relating. According to the report, dominant worldviews, structures, and practices have played a significant role in accelerating biodiversity loss. The findings suggest that exploring alternative approaches could contribute to reducing biodiversity loss and achieving a more just and sustainable future.

Prof. Karen O’Brien (Norway/USA). Credit: Kiara Worth/IPBES

Prof. Arun Agrawal (India & USA). Credit: Kiara Worth/IPBES

Lucas Garibaldi (Argentina). Credit: Kiara Worth/IPBES

“Transformative change for a just and sustainable world is urgent,” says Karen O’Brien (Norway/USA), co-chair of the assessment with Arun Agrawal (India & USA) and Lucas Garibaldi (Argentina). “There is a closing window of opportunity to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and to prevent triggering the potentially irreversible decline and the projected collapse of key ecosystem functions,” she added.

O‘Brien cites that under current trends, there is a serious risk of crossing several irreversible biophysical tipping points, including die-off of low-altitude coral reefs, die-back of the Amazon rainforest, and loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.

Justifying the urgency of transformative change, the report notes that past and current conservation approaches have failed to stop the loss of the variety of animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms. The cost of inaction is high, the report warns.

The report estimates that the cost of addressing biodiversity loss and the decline of nature around the world could double if actions are delayed even by a decade. The report also examines potential opportunities for businesses and innovation through sustainable economic approaches, including nature-positive economies, ecological economies, and Mother-Earth-centric economies.

But the report offers hope. Implementing sustainable solutions to reverse biodiversity loss could generate business opportunities estimated at more than USD 10 trillion in business while supporting 395 million jobs globally by 2030, the report says, stating that transformative change can be created by everyone. In addition, governments can enable transformative change by fostering policies and regulations to benefit nature.

Meeting Sustainable and Biodiversity Goals

The report builds on the 2019 IPBES Global Assessment Report, which found that the only way to achieve global development goals is through transformative change. The latest assessment, prepared over three years, was produced by more than 100 leading experts from 42 countries.

Agrawal says promoting and accelerating transformative change is essential to meeting the 23 action-oriented targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework by 2030 and for achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity.

“Transformative change is rarely the outcome of a single event, driver, or actor,” says Agrawal. “It is better understood as changes that each of us can create and multiple cascading shifts that trigger and reinforce one another, often in unexpected ways.”

While addressing the underlying causes of biodiversity loss is challenging as it is complex, it can be done, argues Garibaldi, co-chair of the assessment. He says a new transformation on the scale of the industrial revolution is needed—but one that conserves and restores the biodiversity of the planet rather than depleting it.

The cover of the Assessment Report on the Underlying Causes of Biodiversity Loss and the Determinants of Transformative Change and Options for Achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity. Credit: IPBES

Case studies of initiatives around the world with transformative potential show that positive outcomes for diverse economic and environmental indicators can happen in a decade or less.

The Transformative Change Report highlights that countries and people can advance deliberate transformative change for global sustainability by conserving places of value to people and nature that exemplify biocultural diversity. Furthermore, people can drive systematic change and mainstream biodiversity in the sectors most responsible for nature’s decline.

“The agriculture and livestock, fisheries, forestry, infrastructure and urban development, mining, and fossil fuel sectors contribute heavily to the worst outcomes for nature,” the report notes. “Transformative approaches such as multifunctional and regenerative land use can promote a variety of benefits for nature and people.”

Inclusivity Key to Nature Transformation

While researching the report, the authors assessed 850 separate “visions of a sustainable world for nature and people,” but found many did not challenge the status quo.

“The diversity of societies, economies, cultures, and peoples means that no single theory or approach provides a complete understanding of transformative change or how to achieve it,” said O’Brien. “Many knowledge systems, including Indigenous and local knowledge, provide complementary insights into how it occurs and how to promote, accelerate, and navigate the change needed for a just and sustainable world.”

At the launch, on Wednesday, December 18, Agrawal said every global problem is often, in essence, unfolding in local context, and what is seen as a global problem is closely and intimately connected to Indigenous knowledge relevant to a local context. He said, for example, adaptation efforts relevant in the Arctic would not be relevant in tropical forests, and emissions that are caused by what is happening in agriculture are not relevant to emissions caused by coal mines or large factories.

“All of these things that we consider as global problems, we need to think about the local particularity of the problem that gets aggregated into a global problem,” said Agrawal.

Coordinating lead author Rafael Calderon Contreras added that humanity was facing the most pressing and challenging crisis in history and that it was critical to learn from Indigenous communities on solutions to tackling the biodiversity crisis.

“What we found in our assessment is that we can learn from each other and that everyone has a role to play in achieving this vision of transformation that the assessment is pushing,” said Contreras.

Visions for living in harmony with nature are more likely to succeed when they emerge from inclusive, rights-based approaches and stakeholder processes and when they incorporate collaboration for change across sectors, the authors suggest.

Principles and Obstacles

The report says embracing the principles of equity and justice; pluralism and inclusion; respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships; and adaptive learning and action can achieve transformative change.

“The impacts of actions and resources devoted to blocking transformative change, for example through lobbying by vested interest groups or corruption, currently overshadow those devoted to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity,” says O’Brien.

Garibaldi says studies have suggested that increasing biodiversity, protecting natural habitats, and reducing external inputs in agricultural landscapes can enhance crop productivity, for instance, by enhancing pollinator abundance and diversity.

Other strategies that can be used to advance transformative change include changing economic systems for nature and equity, for example, eliminating subsidies that contribute to biodiversity loss. Global public explicit subsidies to sectors driving nature’s decline ranged from USD 1.4 trillion to USD 3.3 trillion per year in 2022, and total public funding for environmentally harmful subsidies has increased by 55 percent since 2021.

It is estimated that between USD 722 billion and USD 967 billion per year is needed to manage biodiversity and maintain ecosystem integrity. Currently, USD 135 billion per year is spent on biodiversity conservation, leaving a biodiversity funding gap of up to USD 824 billion per year.

Transforming governance systems to be inclusive, accountable, and adaptive will promote transformation, the report says, noting that shifting societal views and values to recognize human-nature interconnectedness was strategic for the world to act with haste.

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IPBES’ nexus assessment concludes that environmental, social, and economic crises—such as biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, health risks, and climate change—are all interconnected, and need interlinking solutions.

By Busani Bafana
WINDHOEK & BULAWAYO, Dec 17 2024 (IPS)

Biological diversity is on the decline worldwide, and current approaches to address its loss have been piecemeal and ineffective in tackling the crisis facing nature—this is despite estimates that over half of global GDP (USD 58 trillion of economic activity in 2023) is generated in sectors that are moderately to highly dependent on nature, a new report by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) finds.

The Thematic Assessment Report on the Interlinkages Among Biodiversity, Water, Food, and Health—known as the Nexus Report—finds that biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate change are connected crises.

Recognizing and leveraging the connections between biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate change is the way to go about solving the crises, says the report approved at the 11th session of the IPBES Plenary being held in Namibia this week.

IPBES is a global science-policy body providing science evidence to decision-makers for people and nature.

The report, a product of three years of work by 165 leading international experts from 57 countries, finds that existing actions to address these crises fail to tackle the complexity of interlinked problems and result in inconsistent governance.

The front cover of the IPBES Nexus assessment report. Credit: IPBES

Integrated Solutions Needed

Prof. Paula Harrison (United Kingdom), co-chair of the assessment with Prof. Pamela McElwee (USA), highlighted that policymakers should decide and act beyond single-issue silos.

“Our current approaches to dealing with these crises have tended to be fragmented or siloed, and that’s led to inefficiencies and has often been counterproductive,” she says.

“If we try to address climate change, for example, by planting trees, we have to be really aware about what trees we are planting (to ensure they) are not actually making problems for biodiversity,” Harrison says, citing an often-implemented solution to reduce greenhouse gases.

Prof. Paula Harrison (United Kingdom), co-chair of the assessment report. Credit Kiara Worth/IPBES

Prof. Pamela McElwee (USA), co-chair of the assessment report. Credit: Kiara Worth/IPBES

Instead, the report offers response options, actions, or policies that can help advance governance and sustainable management of one or more elements of the nexus.

“What the report also offers is this suite of solutions. It stresses that we have over 70 response options available now that different actors can use in different context-dependent situations.”

The assessment also highlighted the unintended consequences when issues of nature are addressed in isolation.

For example, when the bat population in the United States declined due to a fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome, farmers increased their use of pesticides. This caused unintended health impacts, with an 8 percent rise in infant mortality reported in affected areas.

However, where a problem is tackled holistically, it can have positive impacts, as in bilharzia, a parasitic disease that affects more than 200 million people worldwide but is especially prevalent in Africa.

“Treated only as a health challenge—usually through medication—the problem often recurs as people are reinfected. An innovative project in rural Senegal took a different approach—reducing water pollution and removing invasive water plants to reduce the habitat for the snails that host the parasitic worms that carry the disease—resulting in a 32 percent reduction in infections in children, improved access to freshwater, and new revenue for the local communities,” says McElwee.

“The best way to bridge single-issue silos is through integrated and adaptive decision-making. ‘Nexus approaches’ offer policies and actions that are more coherent and coordinated—moving us towards the transformative change needed to meet our development and sustainability goals.”

The High Cost of Inaction

Warning of the high economic costs of inaction and the significant cost of biodiversity loss and climate change impacts, the report highlighted that biodiversity has been the loser in the tradeoffs where short-term gains are implemented and often neglect long-term sustainability.

“Policies informed by Nexus principles can create “win-win” solutions across sectors,” the report says.

According to the report, unaccounted-for costs of current approaches to tackling the multiple crises of biodiversity, water, health, food, and climate change are at least USD 10–25 trillion per year.

McElwee stressed that unaccounted-for costs, alongside direct public subsidies to economic activities worth about USD 1,7 trillion a year, have negative impacts on biodiversity. These subsidies have enhanced annual private sector financial flows estimated at USD 5.3 trillion, which are directly damaging to biodiversity.

“Delayed action on biodiversity goals, for example, could as much as double costs—also increasing the probability of irreplaceable losses such as species extinction,” McElwee warned, emphasizing that delayed action on climate change adds at least USD 500 billion per year in additional costs for meeting policy targets.

The Nexus report, building on previous IPBES reports that identified the most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss, states that indirect socioeconomic factors such as increasing waste, overconsumption, and population growth have intensified the direct drivers of biodiversity loss.

“Efforts of governments and other stakeholders have often failed to take into account indirect drivers and their impact on interactions between nexus elements because they remain fragmented, with many institutions working in isolation—often resulting in conflicting objectives, inefficiencies, and negative incentives, leading to unintended consequences,” says Harrison.

The IPBES Nexus assessment has recommended a shift to more integrated, inclusive, equitable, coordinated, and adaptive approaches as a solution to biodiversity loss.

Tapping Opportunities

The Nexus Report recommends a shift from the ‘business as usual’ approach to direct and indirect drivers of change, spelling doom for biodiversity, water quality, and human health. Furthermore, it warns that maximizing the outcomes for only one part of the nexus in isolation will result in negative outcomes for other nexus elements.

For example, a ‘food first’ approach prioritizes food production with positive benefits for nutritional health, arising from unsustainable intensification of production and increased per capita consumption. But this has negative impacts on biodiversity, water, and climate change.

“Future scenarios do exist that have positive outcomes for people and nature by providing co-benefits across the nexus elements,” Harrison says. “The future scenarios with the widest nexus benefits are those with actions that focus on sustainable production and consumption in combination with conserving and restoring ecosystems, reducing pollution, and mitigating and adapting to climate change.”

Noting that current governance structures and approaches are not responsive enough to meet the interconnected challenges from the accelerated speed and scale of environmental change and rising inequalities, the report has recommended a shift to more integrated, inclusive, equitable, coordinated, and adaptive approaches.

The work of IPBES provides the science and evidence to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and the Paris Agreement on climate change, says Harrison.

Inger Andersen, Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), commented that the IPBES Nexus Assessment is the first comprehensive global assessment that looks at the interlinkages between crises and identifies solutions.

“Biodiversity is vital to the efforts to meet humanity’s growing need for food, feed, fiber, and fuel while protecting the planet for future generations,” Andersen says. “We need to produce more with less, through the Four Betters: better production, better nutrition, a better environment, and a better life—leaving no one behind.”

While Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), added that actions to address global challenges affecting biodiversity, water, food, health, and the climate system are often taken without sufficient regard to the interlinkages between them. She says such actions result in shortcomings and adverse impacts on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people.

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Christian Thierfelder, Principal Scientist at CIMMYT, poses in a field that is being tested for conservation agriculture at Henderson Research Station, Harare, Zimbabwe. Credit, Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Dec 5 2024 (IPS)

On the dusty plains of Shamva District in Zimbabwe, Wilfred Mudavanhu’s maize field defies drought.>

With the El Niño-induced drought gripping several countries in Southern Africa, Mudavanhu’s maize crop is flourishing, thanks to an innovative farming method that helps keep moisture in the soil and promotes soil health.

Once harvesting just 1.5 tonnes of maize (30-50 kg bags) each season, Mudavanhu’s harvest jumped to 2.5 tonnes of maize (50 bags) in the 2023/2024 cropping season.

Mudavanhu is one of many farmers in Zimbabwe embracing conservation agriculture, a method that prioritizes minimal soil disturbance, crop rotation, and soil moisture conservation. The practice is complemented by other methods such as timely control of weeds, mulching, and farming on a small plot to gain high yields.

Researchers say the conservation agriculture method is proving a lifeline for farmers grappling with climate change.

For more than 20 years, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) has promoted research on conservation agriculture in Southern Africa with the aim of getting farmers to increase their crop yields.

Under conventional farming, smallholder maize yields have often been below 1 tonne per hectare in Zimbabwe, according to researchers. Adopting CA practices has led to yield increases of up to 90 percent. While in Malawi farmers have experienced maize yields increased by up to 400 percent, crops are integrated with nitrogen-fixing trees such as Faidherbia albida. In Zambia, maize yields under conventional farming have been at 1.9 tonnes per hectare, and these have increased to 4.7 tonnes per hectare where farmers have used conservation agriculture practices.

But beyond high yields, conservation agriculture saves moisture and enhances soil health, offering farmers a long-term solution to the growing problem of soil degradation, a looming threat in the face of climate change, researchers said.

“As the climate crisis deepens, CA has become essential for Southern African farmers, offering a resilient, climate-smart approach to boost productivity and withstand climate change impacts, reinforcing sustainable food security,” Christian Thierfelder, a principal scientist at CIMMYT, told IPS, explaining that CA could be a game changer for the rainfed cropping system in the region.

About 3 million farmers in Southern Africa are practicing CA, Thierfelder said, adding: “The more climate change hits as seen in recent droughts, the more the farmers will adopt CA because the traditional way of doing agriculture will not always work anymore.”

The use of machines is attracting smallholder farmers to adopt conservation agriculture. CIMMYT has researched using machines suitable for smallholder CA systems.

The machines have been found to increase intercropping methods farmers use while addressing the challenges of high labour demands associated with conservation agriculture.

Traditionally, farmers spend hours digging planting basins, a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. The basin digger has mechanized the land preparation stage, reducing the number of people needed to dig the basins.

Thierfelder said CIMMYT has partnered with registered service providers in Zimbabwe and Zambia, who offer mechanization services that improve farming efficiency and reduce labour demands. One such innovation, the basin digger—a cost-effective, low-energy machine—reduces labour by up to 90 percent.

Cosmas Chari, a farmer and service provider in Shamva, used to spend a day digging basins for planting, but now he takes an hour using the basin digger.

Mudavanhu became a mechanization service provider after integrating CA with mechanization. As a service provider, Mudavanhu hires out a two-wheeled tractor, a sheller, and a ripper to other farmers practicing CA.

Similarly, another farmer, Advance Kandimiri, is also a service provider practicing CA.

“I started being a mechanization service provider in 2022 and adopted CA using mechanization,” said Kandimiri, who bought a tractor, a sheller, and a two-row planter.

“Conservation agriculture is more profitable than conventional farming that I was doing before I learned about CA,” said Kandimiri.

Data from CIMMYT’s research indicates that farmers adopting CA practices can earn extra income of approximately USD 368 per hectare as a result of getting higher yields and reduced input costs.

Conservation Agriculture in the Region

Farmers across Southern Africa have found success after adopting CA practices with remarkable results.

In 2011, during a visit to Monze in Zambia’s Southern Province, Gertrude Banda observed the significant benefits of CA firsthand. Farmers practicing CA for over seven years demonstrated how planting crops without tillage using an animal traction ripper led to reduced labour in land preparation and improved crop yields.

Banda says she was motivated by this experience to adopt CA on her own 9-hectare farm, where she grows cowpeas, groundnuts, and soybeans. She practices crop rotation, alternating maize with various legumes to enhance soil fertility and improve crop yields. Additionally, she uses groundnut and cowpea residues for livestock feed. She earned about USD 5,000 from selling her soya crop.

“Today, my entire farm follows CA principles,” Banda said. “All my crops are planted in rip lines, and I rotate maize with various legumes to maintain soil health.”

Over 65,000 farmers in Malawi and 50,000 in Zambia have adopted CA, according to CIMMYT, whose research shows that farmer education, training, and technical guidance are vital for farmers to make the shift.

However, widespread adoption of conservation agriculture has remained low despite its acknowledged advantages. Smallholder farmers face challenges in accessing inputs and equipment, said Hambulo Ngoma, an agricultural economist at CIMMYT.

Besides, farmers have limited knowledge of effective weed control and struggle with short-term yield uncertainties, which can discourage consistent practice, Ngoma said.

“While CA has proven its worth, adoption rates are still relatively low across Southern Africa,” Ngoma said, adding, “Many farmers lack the resources to invest in the tools and training required for effective implementation.”

Fruitful Partnerships to Promote Conservation Agriculture

Blessing Mhlanga, a cropping systems agronomist with CIMMYT’s Sustainable Agrifood Systems program, said the success of CA goes beyond technology and techniques but is hinged on education and including CA principles in national policies. In Zambia, for instance, CIMMYT, in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), helped design a mechanization strategy that has paved the way for mechanized CA to be incorporated into government-led agricultural programs.

“Technologies like intensification with Gliricidia, a fast-growing nitrogen fixing tree, strip cropping, and permanently raised beds are now part of Zambia’s national agriculture agenda,” explained Mhlanga, who noted that the adoption of CA by smallholder farmers can be transformative, particularly in regions reliant on rainfed cropping.

Mhlanga said with more than 250 million hectares of land currently under CA globally and adoption rates of the CA practices increasing by 10 million hectares annually, the future of CA is promising. However, much work remains to be done in providing smallholder farmers like Mudavanhu with the right tools and knowledge to adopt conservation agriculture fully.

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Three-Michelin-starred chef Mauro Colagreco, the flag bearer of circular gastronomy, which aims to align food and nature. Credit: Mirazur

By Busani Bafana
CALI, Columbia & BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Oct 28 2024 (IPS)

“How we prepare and eat food should not be at the expense of our biodiversity,” says 3-Michelin-starred chef Mauro Colagreco, who is on a mission to change our relationship with food and what we choose to eat.

Colagreco, the owner of Mirazur, an award-winning restaurant in Menton, France, is a tribute to gastronomy. Among other world rankings, Mirazur’s fine food and service have earned it first place in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. In the 2020 edition of the “100 Chefs” world ranking, Colagreco’s peers named him the Best Chef in the World and Chef of the Year in 2019. 

A passion for cooking and the love of nature shaped Colagreco’s philosophy on gastronomy.

“Feeding others, for me, is the first act of love,” Colagreco told IPS in an interview. “You know, when I was looking at my son being born, the first thing my wife did after giving birth was to feed the baby. For me, it was super strong to see that, and I always think about that, and that, for me, is the first act of love.”

Eating Without Eating the Planet

For over two decades, Colagreco has been the flag bearer of circular gastronomy, a culinary movement he initiated when he opened Mirazur in 2006.

Circular gastronomy aims to reconnect with nature while reconciling the perfect mastery of the techniques of cuisine with a genuine commitment to society’s wellbeing.

The principles of Colagreco’s circular gastronomy are captured in a manifesto that brings together food, nature and sustainability. It proposes a profound change in our relationship with food by making food choices that respect nature. Some of the principles call for the consumption of fresh, local, seasonal, organically or biodynamically grown produce. There is also a particular focus on the restoration of the soil and cooking that preserves plant and animal biodiversity.

In 2022, Colagreco was named the first ever Chef Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity by the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) in recognition of his promotion and protection of biodiversity. At the onset of COP16 in Cali, Colombia, which is discussing global biodiversity, IPS spoke with Colagreco about sustainable food and nature-positive eating.

UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay with Mauro Colagreco when he was announced as the first Chef Goodwill Ambassador. Credit: UNESCO

Here are excerpts from the interview:

IPS: You were appointed the first ever Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity? Why would a 3-Michelin-starred chef accept a role like this and what do you see yourself bringing to the role of a global ambassador for biodiversity?

Mauro Colagreco: Well, first of all, it is with deep gratitude and pride. I was super happy to accept this because I am very involved in the implementation of sustainability practices in my restaurant, Mirazur. I am involved with regenerative agriculture, the fight against plastic use, waste management, and all kinds of things we can do to make our footprint more sustainable. This role gives a lot of power to our message and our practices. It is an opportunity for bigger action to democratize a necessary vision for gastronomy—a more circular gastronomy. I believe that, as chefs, if we can act together, we will have a real impact.

This new role of ambassador recognizes that our responsibility as chefs is bigger than our kitchens. It shows that from the soil to the plate, everything is connected, and that we can lead a paradigm shift.

I am a day-to-day peaceful activist, and I’m a campaigner; we can’t be silent anymore. We must take action!

So, that’s why I accepted this role of goodwill ambassador, and what can I bring? I think first of all, I can bring my knowledge of the food industry. I know how it works now, and I know how it can be reshaped to work better. I can bring my experience because we have spent years testing and learning about several topics where we can have a real influence in our industry, in our region, and on our planet. My mission is to save biodiversity, save our food traditions, and make our food more sustainable. For me, the plan to follow is to educate everyone. The key is education.

With my fellow chefs through the Relais & Châteaux Association, of which I am the vice president, we regularly educate chefs about the challenge of biodiversity. For example, we are now continuing a major campaign to stop serving endangered species like eel in all the 800 restaurants of the network. Also, I have initiated a big program that will turn the chefs of Relais & Châteaux into local biodiversity ambassadors on a daily basis. This is a huge program with UNESCO, which we will announce in the coming weeks.

IPS: What motivated your commitment to sustainable food in the first place? What are your personal convictions? Can you explain more about this?

Colagreco: Yes, my personal conviction is that by choosing what we eat and what we cook, we choose the world we want to live in and that is really my motto.

To me, everything is interdependent and interconnected. We cannot isolate one aspect of life from another. If we change the way we grow food, we change our actual food;  we change the way our society works; we change our values. That is my life vision and mission.

What motivates me even more is to propose a real alternative to resolve the alarming situation we are facing. I understood that when I opened Mirazur in 2006. I had a bit of land at the restaurant, and I started gardening on a very small plot.

At that moment, I started to read a lot about agriculture, many books, and one especially, The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, really influenced me. This book changed my mind.

That is when I began to understand the profound link between gastronomy and the environment. I understood the importance of biodiversity for our cuisine, for cuisine in general, and, of course, for our planet. And then the small land where I started turned into five hectares of permaculture and biodynamic gardens, where I grew more than 1,500 species and varieties of vegetables. We produce nearly 70 percent of what we serve at the restaurant. So, what we propose, in the end, is a seed-to-plate gastronomy, because we take care of the whole process

IPS: What does it mean to reconcile the environmental impact of the world’s most exclusive fine dining with concerns about sustainability and better stewardship of nature?

Colagreco: That means that making food can no longer be at the expense of the planet. We need to reconnect with nature and rediscover the joy of feeding people in harmony with the planet.

Again, we can no longer eat while eating the planet; that is sure, but the problem is not haute gastronomy. In high gastronomy, you touch a very small segment of the population. The problem is mass consumption. You know, it is how we will feed the 8 billion people on the planet.

That is a huge thing, but that is not a problem because we have great news: we can take the same respectful methods we use in haute gastronomy, apply them to more accessible cuisine, and scale them up. Circular gastronomy, as I say, is not just for the rich elite but for everyone. We’ve tested it, and it works.

Mauro Colagreco believes feeding people is a first act of love and believes food, nature and sustainability should be one. Credit: Mirazur

IPS: You are attending the big Conference of the Parties (COP16) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Cali, Colombia, this week. What are some of the things that you hope will be achieved by governments around the world at this meeting, and what do you personally hope to do at the COP?

Colagreco: I’m more than honored to be part of this important meeting. All the countries will be there, all the major organizations will be there, and we will all be looking at what we can do to save our biodiversity.

So, for me, in this situation of crisis, we need more ambitious policies to save where we live and our food, fundamentally change the way we live and consume, and fundamentally reorganize the way our society works.

As IPBES says, we need a common strategy because we are all in this together. My role as ambassador is to encourage change and show by example that there are solutions.

What I really want to do is make a solemn appeal to all governments, international organizations, chefs, educators, and citizens around the world to join forces and create and implement a global programme of good nutrition education for our children. I believe that this is the most important action to change the food system. Education is the key.

We need to create a generation that is aware of the importance of biodiversity and committed to making the right food choices. That’s why I really believe this appeal is important, and it is what I want to personally do at the COP.

IPS: You are clearly more than just a chef—your restaurants are exceptionally successful businesses as well. Why does sustainable food make good business sense?

Colagreco: Well, first, because I really believe it is the business of the future. To continue with our current paradigm is like a crime against humanity. The choice of circular gastronomy is a choice of awareness—it’s a choice of values. It means something to everyone. I’m delighted to see the younger generation becoming more aware of that. When I see my children, my sons, I tell myself that we are doing this for them to pass on the right message.

It is a real choice to work for sustainable food—it is usually more demanding—let’s face it. But what I find interesting is that it is like a sport. At first, it is hard to run a mile because you have not built up the muscles, but once you are trained, you can easily run for an hour or even more. So, it is the same for sustainable food and sustainable business; we need to start and be more physically ready.

To change habits is a choice. We must change habits. Of course, it is an effort; it is not easy to go out of your comfort zone. But we must. It is an obligation. Sustainable food is good business.

IPS: You are from Argentina—a country of the Global South—but you have restaurants in France, China, Thailand, and Japan. What role should the developing countries and the hospitality industries in the Global South play in sustainable food and biodiversity conservation?

Colagreco: We have to be careful because my role as ambassador is to lead by example and amplify the voice of biodiversity. We have about 30 restaurants worldwide, and it’s very interesting because the more I travel, the more I realize that the challenges are different everywhere. Situations vary so much that, of course, there is no one way.

It is not the same situation in Asia, South America, the United States, Europe, or Africa. Even in every area, you have very different situations

My first priority when settling in a new country is to identify the local committed producer, with whom I can work to implement our circular gastronomy. My aim is always the same: to cook as much local, fresh and well-grown produce as possible. It is a question of respect for our clients and for the communities that work hard to offer a better food alternative. It’s a question of respecting our planet.

Everyone needs to contribute, and my role is not to point fingers. The role of governments is to support their sustainable agriculture, their sustainable fishing industry, to protect their waste management, to regulate it and to fight against all unsustainable practices.

And the role of hospitality leaders is to have the courage to let circular gastronomy define their food and beverage offers.

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The International Livestock Research Institute is using genomics to breed livestock suited to local conditions and production systems to meet community needs. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Oct 22 2024 (IPS)

Christian Tiambo has always wished to uplift local farmers’ communities through cutting-edge science.

As climate change wreaked havoc on local agriculture, Tiambo, a livestock scientist at the Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health (CTLGH) and at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), focused on conserving and developing livestock that could withstand environmental stress.

Genomics, a Game Changer

Tiambo’s research took an exciting turn when part of his PhD studies was to characterize and establish local poultry populations with interesting resilience potential. Yet, the need for local access to advanced genomic tools was a barrier to fully unlocking this potential.

Today, the power of digital data and sequencing information is transformative. It is driving the discovery of genes and innovation in agriculture through the identification and deep characterization of pathogens in plants and animals. That is helping scientists to breed livestock suited to local conditions and production systems, thereby benefiting local communities that have been custodians of genetic resources for generations.

But there is a catch: Africa, like other parts of the global south, is a genetic goldmine but has not fully capitalized on the digital sequencing information (DSI) derived from its genetic heritage. DSI is a tool that provides information for the precise identification of living organisms and allows the development of diagnosis tools and technologies for conservation in animals and plants. Besides, DSI is also used in investigating the relationships within and between species and in plant and animal breeding to predict their breeding value and potential contribution to their future generations.

Tiambo said DSI can be used to adjust the genotypes and produce animals with desired traits, adapted to local conditions but which have higher productivity.

A promising innovation has been the development of surrogate technologies in poultry, small ruminants, cattle or pigs—giving opportunity to local and locally adapted and resilient breeds to carry and disseminate semen from improved breeds in challenging environments.

“Farmers would not need to keep requesting inseminators and semen from outside their village,” Tiambo explained, noting that this shift could dramatically improve livestock breeding, dissemination of elite genetics, boost food security and alleviate poverty in remote rural areas of Africa.

Global cooperation among stakeholders of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is key to establishing international guidelines on benefit-sharing from animal genetics resources and their associated information, including DSI.

Christian Tiambo, a livestock scientist at the Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health. Credit: ILRI

Using genetics and associated traditional knowledge includes adapting specific livestock to specific environments. This contributes to the development of improved and elite tropical animal breeds with particular traits that meet community needs to improve livelihoods, he said.

“Local livestock is not just for food but is our heritage, culture and social value,” said Tiambo, adding that conserving livestock is conserving local culture, social ethics and inclusion, with gender aspects being considered. For example, the Muturu cattle and the Bakosi cattle in Nigeria and Cameroon are animals used in dowry, The Bamileke cattle remain sacred and maintain the ecosystem of sacred forest in part of the western highlands of Cameroon.

“I have never seen any traditional ceremony done with exotic chicken in any African village,” he said.

Genetics and DSI, according to Tiambo, are “game changers” in breeding livestock with desired traits faster. What used to take five to seven years or more, he says, can now be done in just three or four cycles with the help of genomics.

ILRI has been working with the Roslin Institute, the Kenyan Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization and collaborating with the African Union-InterAfrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR), the National Biosafety Authority, farmer communities, and National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) in Africa and Southeast Asia in the conservation and development of improved local chicken using stem cell technologies.

Bridging the Capacity Gap

DSI needs infrastructure and human resources. “A lot of infrastructure, equipment and skills are coming from outside Africa, but how can we also generate DSI and use it locally?” Tiambo asked. He worries that without developing local capacity to harness DSI, “a lot of helicopter research will still be happening in Africa where people fly in, just pick what they want, fly out, and no scientists in Africa are involved in generating and using DSI.”

Technologically advanced countries have often exploited these genetic resources, developing commercial products and services without clear mechanisms for sharing the monetary and non-monetary benefits with local communities as ethics and common sense would require—an injustice that needs urgent correction.

The use of DSI on genetic resources is one of the four goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in 2022 with the aim of stopping global biodiversity loss by 2030.

ThankGod Ebenezer, bioinformatician and co-founder of the African BioGenome Project, argues that Africa must seize this moment to build and strengthen local capacity to produce and use DSI from genetic resources.

“The establishment of a benefit-sharing mechanism for DSI is a first step in the right direction and Africa needs to maximise even this first step by putting in a framework to generate and make use of DSI locally,” Ebenezer told IPS, explaining that Africa needs to be able to do genetic sequencing on the ground with local scientists having the capacity to translate and use it.

The Africa BioGenome Project, of which Tiambo is also a founding member, is a continental biodiversity conservation initiative that has laid out a roadmap for how Africa can benefit from DSI and the planned multilateral fund.

“The main benefit comes from being able to use DSI and ultimately share it with the global community in line with the national and international rules and regulations,” said Ebenezer. “Because if you cannot use DSI yourself, you will always feel like a supplier, like someone who gets crude oil from the ground and asks someone else to add value to it and gets several products.”

“The multilateral fund is key,” Ebenezer stresses. “If someone converts DSI into revenue, for instance, they’re only looking at paying 1% back into the fund. Is that enough for the communities that hold this biodiversity?”

At COP16 in Colombia (Oct 21-Nov 1, 2024), world leaders will discuss mechanisms for fair and equitable sharing of DSI benefits, a critical step for Africa and other biodiversity-rich regions. For example, Africa hosts eight of the 34 biodiversity hotspots in the world, according to the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

“In terms of the negotiation, we would like the DSI fund to be approved so that it’s ready for implementation because this is an implementation COP,” Susana Muhamad, Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development of Colombia and COP16 President-designate, told a press briefing ahead of COP16.

“We would like the decision of the parties to give the COP the teeth for implementation. One is the DSI,” Muhamad said.

Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, is hopeful that COP16 will operationalize the multilateral mechanism for the sharing of benefits from the use of digital sequencing information in genetic research.

“We are going to look at that. And I think it’s a very complex term and issue, but it is ultimately about how those industries, sectors and companies that use digital sequence information on genetic resources that are often located in the global south, but not exclusively, how they use it and how they pay for using it,” said Schomaker, noting that COP15 agreed to establish a multilateral mechanism and a Fund for DSI.

The fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising out of the use of genetic resources is one of the three objectives of the CDB, including the conservation of biological diversity and sustainable use of its components. Target 18 of the CBD seeks to reduce harmful incentives by at least USD 500 billion per year by 2030, money that could be channelled to halting biodiversity loss.

The World Resources Institute (WRI), in a position paper, has urged COP16 to provide more finance and incentives to support nature and biodiversity goals.

There is currently a USD 700 billion gap between annual funding for nature and what’s needed by 2030 to protect and restore ecosystems, the WRI said, noting that “many of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems—and biggest carbon sinks—are in developing countries that cannot save them without far more financial support.”

The WRI commented that bringing in more private sector finance will require incentives, which can come from policy and regulation as well as market-based strategies to make investments in nature more attractive.

But this should not substitute for shifting harmful subsidies and delivering international public finance to the countries that need it most, WRI argued.

As the world scrambles to stop biodiversity loss by 2030, the upcoming COP16 discussions could be pivotal in ensuring that Africa finally benefits from its own genetic wealth.

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