Plant breeding has been remarkably successful in developing high-yielding crop cultivars that have helped to sustain global food production over the last century. For instance, in the United States, the yield of the hybrid corn was increased 3 times, from 4 tons per hectare in the 1960s to 12 tons per hectare in 2017. By selecting and crossing plants with desirable traits, breeders have created crops that are more productive and adapted to intensive agriculture. However, this success has come with a trade-off: breeding has relied on genetic variation within a very limited primary gene pool, which has been shrinking due to genetic bottlenecks caused by domestication and intensive selection. As a result, today’s crops have lost much of their natural genetic diversity, making further improvement increasingly difficult.
Most insects that interact with plants have preferences for certain chemical components in the material they consume. In the case of insect herbivores and pollinators, both groups often need specific nutrients, or the avoidance of compounds that are toxic for them. As a consequence, they have evolved preferences or aversions to specific plant compounds, which guide their foraging for food sources.
On April 3, 2025, Neshan Gunasekera (Chief Executive Officer and Councilor of the World Future Council) will share his experiences on how you can prepare for a career at the interface between science and policy.
The unprecedented pace of technological progress is transforming our society, but is also driving an ever-growing demand for electrical energy. Meanwhile, The UN Sustainable Development Goal 7 pushes toward a future where everyone, everywhere, has access to clean, affordable, and reliable energy. This calls for cleaner production and conscious use of sustainable energy. Addressing this challenge of a sustainable energy transition is vital for the future of our society. A key factor in this regard is the efficiency of electrical networks. An efficient network, with minimal losses, enables innovations such as smart grids and the integration of renewable energy sources.
As the need for climate change mitigation intensifies, a crucial challenge emerges: how do we tackle the menace of carbon dioxide emissions? One promising solution is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a technology by which carbon dioxide emissions are captured and stored deep underground in rock formations or depleted oil wells. While CCS holds significant potential for curbing industrial contributions to climate change, it demands suitable underground storage space for the captured carbon dioxide, which is accompanied by two major hurdles. First, identifying these locations is challenging because storing carbon dioxide requires special geological conditions underground. Second, this may give rise to “Not-In-My-Backyard” protests in communities that host carbon dioxide storage projects due to public misperceptions of carbon dioxide as toxic for individuals.
Since the domestication of wheat about 7,500 years ago, this important crop has undergone significant changes (de Sousa et al. 2021). Through targeted breeding, high-yielding wheat varieties have been developed to feed the growing global population, but this comes at the cost of reduced genetic diversity (Balfourier et al. 2019).
In view of biodiversity loss, it is important that early-career researchers get involved not only in science but also contribute to biodiversity policy. The Blue-Green Biodiversity research initiative of Eawag and WSL organised a workshop to facilitate cooperation between science, practice and politics.
As climate change accelerates and CO2 emission reductions alone prove insufficient to meet climate targets, carbon removal has become essential for tackling hard-to-abate emissions. However, deploying carbon removal at scale presents a critical challenge for governments: How can they ensure it is both effective and affordable enough to secure public support? We show that this public support challenge can be overcome if carbon removal practices are deployed in combination with regulations that enhance the durability of CO2 removal , even if these regulations increase costs.
From the Burren in Ireland and the Erins in France to the Alps in Switzerland, grasslands are vital ecosystems that play a crucial role in supporting biodiversity, providing ecosystem services, and ensuring food security. These vast and diverse grasslands are just a few of the many that cover around 17% of the European Union’s total surface area, as of 2018 (EUROSTAT 2021). Grasslands are among the most species-rich habitats on Earth (Petermann and Buzhdygan), home to a wide variety of flora and fauna, and are essential breeding grounds for birds and invertebrates. In addition, they provide numerous ecosystem services such as water purification, soil erosion prevention and carbon sequestration. Grasslands contain various species of forage grasses, crucial for feeding livestock. Forage grasses, such as Lolium spp. and Festuca spp. are valuable, environment-friendly sources of livestock feed. However, frequent and unpredictable droughts have threatened forage grass yields, posing significant challenges to farmers and livestock managers.
Vom Klimawandel über den Umgang mit Pandemien bis zu geopolitischen Konflikten – in diversen Politikfeldern spielt wissenschaftliche Expertise eine Rolle. Dadurch gerät Wissenschaft unter Druck: Ihr wachsender Einfluss als System, die Welt zu verstehen und zu erklären, weckt Begehrlichkeiten und Widerstände zugleich. Vor dem Hintergrund unserer 20 Thesen für eine wissenschaftsfreundliche Kultur möchten wir an dieser Podiumsdiskussion in Zusammenarbeit mit der Universität Bern erörtern, wie politisch Wissenschaft sein darf.
