Health Trotter

February 26, 2021 at 08:01PM Sylvain Hugel is one of the world’s foremost experts on crickets of the Indian Ocean Islands . So when he received an email from a fellow entomologist in March 2017 asking for help identifying a species in Madagascar that could be farmed for humans to consume, he thought it was a joke. “I’m working to protect those insects, not eat them,” the French academic responded tartly. But the emails from Brian Fisher , an ant specialist at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, kept coming. Fisher had been doing fieldwork in Madagascar when he realized that the forests where both he and Hugel conducted much of their research were disappearing. Nearly 80% of Madagascar’s forest coverage has been destroyed since the 1950s, and 1-2% of what remains is cut down each year as farmers clear more trees to make room for livestock. The only way to prevent this, Fisher told Hugel in his emails, was to give locals an alternative source of protein. ...

February 26, 2021 at 06:35PM The language of diplomacy rarely allows for a true sense of emotion or urgency. But reading between the lines of the latest report commissioned by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—the body representing the 197 member nations of the Paris Agreement to minimize a global average temperature rise this century—the message is clear. The world has precisely ten months to get our act together if there is to be any hope of staving off a climate catastrophe by the end of the century. If member nations are to achieve the Paris Agreement target of limiting global temperature rise above preindustrial levels by 2°C—ideally 1.5°C—by 2100, they must redouble efforts and submit stronger, more ambitious goals to reduce carbon emissions, according to the report. The document tabulates the national climate action plans [NDCs], of each member nation. The NDCs, which were due at the end of 2020, are essentially blueprints laying ou...