The dwindling agrarian and small farming communities around the world have certainly not had it easy during the last 50 years or so.

Climate scientists have understood for decades that unchecked, man-made global warming will wreak havoc on human civilization. The challenge has only grown more urgent as the scientific understanding expands and the world begins to feel the impacts.

Agriculture plays a key role in food security in Africa. It is also crucial to the economic sector, accounting for between 40%-65% of jobs. Farming is expected to remain an important livelihood for decades to come.

Scientists released a report on global climate change this October that comes with the starkest warning yet: We have just 12 years to make radical changes in nearly every sphere of society if we are going to limit the average world temperature rise to 1.5°C.

Climate change happens when a location’s usual weather is altered. This could be a change in rain levels or usual temperatures. Climate change is also a global phenomenon, including changes in global temperatures or where snow falls on the planet. Climate change takes hundreds to millions of years. 

Two things became immediately clear as the crisis unfolded. The first was that, as we’ve already noted, the municipal, provincial and national authorities had absolutely no idea how to deal with the looming disaster.

Half a century ago concerns about climate change, environment vulnerability, population density and the sustainability of earth systems reached a broad audience. This was clear from books like the Silent Spring published in 1962, and The Limits to Growth published 10 years later.

The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

Later and more intense rainy seasons across parts of Africa due to climate change could have damaging consequences, a new study has found.

 A group of European researchers have found that current breeding programs and cultivar selection practices in Europe do not provide the needed resilience to climate change.

The world’s grain markets face a year of challenges and uncertainty, with weather and politics likely to drive trade flows and prices, said the keynote speaker at the Global Grain Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

The World Bank Group today announced a major new set of climate targets for 2021-2025, doubling its current 5-year investments to around $200 billion in support for countries to take ambitious climate action.

Agriculture and climate change are deeply intertwined. The effects of global warming on food supply are dire, whilst world population is increasing. It's time to change the way agriculture affects the environment, and vice versa.

Extreme climate conditions, prolonged drought, weather anomalies and endangered species are just a few of the aspects to consider when talking about sustainable water supplies. Could precision agriculture be the answer?

The impact of climate change continues to have devastating effects on countries across the globe, and Namibia has not been spared.

The results of a new analysis by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) demonstrated a decrease in “emissions intensity” (emissions per unit of product) of GHG emitted in the production of milk.

As the science weighs more heavily toward a consensus that a) climate change is a real phenomenon and b) human-generated carbon emissions are playing at least a part in causing more volatile weather patterns, it is critical that the global agricultural community combat this phenomenon, to the extent that it can.

Rain is the glue that holds Namibia’s agriculture-based economy, especially for subsistence farmers in the semi-arid southern African nation.

Climate change has been blamed for the wild swings in agricultural crop yields, but it could also result in a doomsday scenario for drinkers: Beer, the world’s top-consumed alcoholic beverage by volume, may at some point be out of reach for hundreds of millions of people around the world, according to a new study.

Agriculture has become a carbon-intensive endeavour. Crop, livestock and fossil fuel use in agriculture account for about 25 per cent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.