The original version of this article, by Lisa Palmer, appeared on Future Food 2050.

As a boy growing up on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, Harvard international development professor Calestous Juma noticed a thing or two about innovations designed to bring more food into his community. He noticed, for instance, that the fishermen were always tinkering with new ways to trap fish while his father, a carpenter, would build the traps. He also noticed that his grandmother, a peanut grower, and other farmers who grew traditional crops such as sweet potatoes, struggled with ways to increase production beyond simply planting the best quality seeds and tubers.

Since 2005, the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program (REDD+) has functioned as a mechanism to financially incentivize the preservation of forestlands in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But beyond its original use, some organizations have also started exploring ways it can help with other development initiatives, like women’s empowerment. [Video Below]

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution some 250 years ago, the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that began about a century and a half later and the atomic half-life of the past seven decades, humans have developed and doused land and dammed and diverted water. These practices have left a wound that continues to fester as the human population swells.

China leads the world in installed wind power by a wide margin, but last year, when it came to actual generation, China produced 20 percent less electricity from wind than the United States.

In 2007, an influential analysis by 11 retired generals and admirals characterized climate change as a “threat multiplier” that could aggravate the conditions for conflict. Last week, in a follow-up report launched at the Wilson Center, members of the CNA Corporation’s Military Advisory Board framed climate change as a more direct and immediate risk, calling it a “catalyst for conflict.”

Half the world’s pigs – 476 million – reside in China. Increasingly prosperous consumers are eating fewer grains and demanding a more protein-rich diet, ballooning the pork industry to 15 times its 1960s-era size. In the last 30 years, Chinese demand for meat has quadrupled and China is now the largest consumer of seafood in the world.

While climate change has enjoyed a recent spike in news coverage, journalists face a constant challenge to bring sustained attention to other environmental stories, including resource scarcity, the changing oceans, and demographic change. [Video Below]