Fighting climate change is the challenge of the century. The last UN Environment Emissions Gap Report warned that, in order to ensure global warming stays below 2°C, efforts should be tripled , and if we want to stay below 1.

A wind of change is blowing across Europe, trying to sweep away all the plastic bags that are littering our countries. January 2018 has been a busy month in this sense.

For the first time in its history, the Global Seed Vault on the Svalbard Islands, Norway, has authorised a withdrawal. It was requested in 2015 by Syria, a country where the war is endangering the local agricultural seed collections.

Plastic products made of PVC, Polystyrene and other prominent plastics are flooding the market. They are a growing threat to the environment, as they are found in the sea or dumped in land fills .

You may think that climate change is being caused by burning oil, coal and gas. But not so fast! The emission of methane from cattle is a surprisingly important factor .

In commercial nurseries, many different plant species are cultivated in the same irrigation sector. This means that the dosage of water and nutrients is often excessive for some of the crops’ requirement, as the most water demanding species set the standards.

Most of the animal proteins found in the meat industry waste have, until now, been underutilised. The challenge is to transform such waste into food of higher functionality and added value .

Marco Lodesani is the director of the honey bee and silkworm unit at the Agricultural Research Council (CRA-API) in Bologna, Italy. He coordinated Apenet , one of the first study highlighting the role of neonicotinoids in Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

The amount of nitrogen that is excreted by livestock is directly proportional to the amount it is fed . This is according to Chris Reynolds a researcher in nutritional physiology of ruminants  at  the University of Reading , UK.

Food processing of cereal and fruits creates a rather voluminous amount of by-products . The London, UK-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers recently estimated that anywhere between 35% and 50%--or 1.

Jaroslav Mysiak is a senior researcher in environmental economics at the Fondazione Eni Erico Mattei and the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change , both in Venice, Italy.

British porridge, Dutch pea soup snert, Italian risotto or Spanish paella are only a small sample of the diversity of diets across Europe .