Family farming offers solutions to global challenges. More than 500 million family farms dominate agriculture – ensuring food security, fighting poverty and hunger, providing employment, and enhancing sustainable resource management. Despite challenges, family farms can become prosperous businesses. Forming part of CTA’s support to the UN International Year of Family Farming (IYFF) in 2014, this special issue of Spore addresses topics such as improved production, training and use of technology and local knowledge. It also covers value chains, co-operatives and profitable integration, and the role of the state, so demonstrating how family farms can enjoy a more productive and secure future.

One of the issues to emerge at CTA’s value chains conference, ‘Making the Connection’, held last November, was the importance of devoting greater efforts to promoting national and regional markets in ACP countries. Governments, development partners and even the private sector have been overly focussed on selling to developed country export markets, which are highlycompetitive and restrictive. Six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies over the last decade are in Africa and, as wealth has increased, food import bills have been skyrocketing. If farmers are to benefit from opportunities presented by the growing food demand from urban populations, marketing channels between rural areas and cities must be significantly improved.

As the climate changes, agriculture needs to transform so that it becomes more profitable, sustainable and resilient. The smallholder farmers and producers who often experience the worst impacts of climate change want practical solutions that work for them and their families. This issue of Spore highlights CTA’s role supporting one such approach, climate smart agriculture (CSA). Featuring positive and inspiring case studies and field reports from across ACP countries, it looks at how farmers, fisheries, young people and community organisations have been working to address the impacts and challenges of climate change.

This collection showcases experiences from research and field projects in climate change adaptation on the African continent. It includes a set of papers presented at a symposium held in Addis Abeba in February 2016, which brought together international experts to discuss “fostering African resilience and capacity to adapt.” The papers introduce a wide range of methodological approaches and practical case studies to show how climate change adaptation can be implemented in regions and countries across the continent. Responding to the need for more cross-sectoral interaction among the various stakeholders working in the field of climate change adaptation, the book fosters the exchange of information on best practices across the African continent.

This book explores the impacts of climate change on Nigeria. How climate change impacts the productivity and future development of different sectors in Nigeria was covered in this book. Various themes of the Nigerian economy, environment, and climate change were considered. Worthy of note are the impacts of climate change on the Nigerian air quality, surface and groundwater resources, watershed and natural resources’ development and planning, soil- quality, fertility, salinization, nutrients and cropping patterns. Also, the impact of climate change on land use/land cover, urbanization and strategic planning, crops and sustainable crop yield; land degradation, soil erosion, landslides and landscapes, rainfall trend patterns, drought vulnerability; ecology, vegetation/forest, carbon and biomass management of Nigeria were investigated. Finally, the problems of climate change in semi-arid and arid regions (with special emphasis on Nigeria) and possible solutions for sustainable development under the changing climate were discussed in this book. Advanced technologies, such as remote sensing, GIS, multivariate analytical tools, and machine learning techniques, were utilized in the exploration and analysis of the themes of this book. Thus, this book is a very important product for point of view researchers, scientists, NGOs, and university communities on the Nigerian climate change. This book is a useful interdisciplinary tool, cutting across various disciplines such as earth sciences, hydrology, environmental sciences, soil science, engineering, remote sensing, natural resources management, and public health management, etc.

Most African national economies depend on the exploitation of both renewable and non-renewable natural resources for development. Conventional and unconventional exploitation of natural resources has left negative carbon footprints. This has also degraded hotspots across the African continent, impacting negatively on people and the environment. A Green Economy offers the continent the opportunity to achieve sustained economic development devoid of environmental degradation and inefficient utilisation of natural resources. This book, Promoting Green Economy, explores issues affecting the socio-economic development of the continent and focuses on Africa’s need for a green economy. With chapters written by seasoned authors from academia and industry across the continent, the book examines the challenges of sustainable management of Africa’s natural resources and recommends the need for the continent to transit towards green economy as this can provide opportunities for minimising environmental footprints of all economic activities. The book calls on the commitment of the public and private sectors to the development of appropriate green economy policies and regulatory frameworks to promote inclusive growth.

This comprehensive book describes in detail the most topical emerging areas of scientific importance involving the use of spores and covers their use as probiotics in humans and animals and also with plants. In addition authors present the emerging use of the spore as a tool for nanobiotechnology where the spore can be used for the efficient display of heterologous proteins on the spore surface. The use of this technology and systematics of spore forming bacteria, and the architecture and assembly of spores. The innovative topics covered in this book will be of particular interest to scientists working in all areas of probiotic research and vaccine technology and is recommended reading for microbiologists involved with Bacillus spp. and other spore forming bacteria.