'The publication of World in Transition: Towards Sustainable Energy Systems is timely indeed. The World Summit on Sustainable Development gave great prominence to this challenge, but failed to agree on a quantitative, time-bound target for the introduction of renewable energy sources. The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) has now produced a report with a global focus, which is essential in view of the global impacts of climate change. The report provides a convincing long-term analysis, which is also essential. Global energy policies have to take a long-term perspective, over the next 50 to 100 years, while providing concrete guidance for decision-makers to implement now. There is an urgent need to secure energy supplies for the 2.4 billion people who still depend upon traditional biomass, while avoiding dangerous climatic changes. Our one world must close the gap between industrialized countries' surfeit and developing countries' poverty. Policies will need to consider both the broader environmental and specific climate constraints. I recommend this book very warmly to everyone concerned with global energy issues' Klaus Topfer, Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme World in Transition: Towards Sustainable Energy Systems underscores the urgent need to transform global energy systems so that the world's population has access to energy based on renewable sources. This is necessary to protect the global climate and to free those in developing countries trapped by energy poverty. Such an approach would also yield a peace dividend by reducing dependence upon regionally concentrated oil reserves. The authors stress that such a reconfiguration of energy systems is both feasible and fundable if rapid and resolute action is taken in the coming two decades. To this end, they propose a roadmap with specific milestones, making this an indispensable contribution to the scientific and policy debates on these critical issues and essential reading for those engaged with them.

Independent, scientifically based, integrated, policy-relevant analysis of current and emerging energy issues for specialists and policymakers in academia, industry, government.

How will the world be able to feed close to 9 billion people in 2050 and still maintain the ecosystems? In this perspective, INRA and CIRAD launched the initiative, in 2006, to develop a foresight project for analysing issues pertaining to the world's food and agricultural systems on the 2050 timeline. This book provides a synthetic presentation of the main conclusions that this foresight project has yielded. First, it recapitulates the main statistical references for the period 1961 to 2003, before going on to describe the Agribiom simulation tool used to calculate food biomass resource use balances. Two scenarios on the 2050 timeline are then considered: Agrimonde GO is a trend-based scenario that bets on economic growth to feed the world, in a context where environmental protection is not a priority; in contrast, the idea in Agrimonde 1 is to feed the world while preserving its ecosystems.

This book is a one-stop reference for practitioners and academics in finance, business and economics, providing a holistic reference to the international agriculture business. It takes a multidisciplinary approach, looking at the issues, opportunities and investable themes in the global agricultural space, combining research and practical tools.

"Sustained, well-targeted, and effectively used investments in R&D have reaped handsome rewards from improved agricultural productivity and cheaper, higher quality foods and fibers. As we begin a new millennium, the global patterns of investments in agricultural R&D are changing in ways that may have profound consequences for the structure of agriculture worldwide and the ability of poor people in poor counties to feed themselves.This report documents and discusses these changing investment patterns, highlighting developments in the public and private sectors. It revises and carries forward to 2000 data that were previously reported in the 2001 IFPRI Food Policy Report Slow Magic: Agricultural R&D a Century After Mendel (PDF 300K). Some past trends are continuing or have come into sharper focus, while others are moving in new directions not apparent in the previous series. In addition, this report illustrates the use of spatial data to analyze spillover prospects among countries or agroecologies and the targeting of R&D to address specific production problems like drought-induced production risks. More detailed data on the agricultural research investment trends summarized here can be accessed at www.asti.cgiar.org."