Watching two billion people

Four billion people facing severe water scarcity.

Freshwater scarcity is increasingly perceived as a global systemic risk. Previous global water scarcity assessments, measuring water scarcity annually, have underestimated experienced water scarcity by failing to capture the seasonal fluctuations in water consumption and availability. We assess blue water scarcity globally at a high spatial resolution on a monthly basis. We find that two-thirds...

Feeding ten billion people. three views.

Recent issues of Plant Physiology have contained a marvelous series of essays dealing with issues and controversies that surround the introduction and use of crops developed through the application of recombinant DNA technologies and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). These articles have provided considerable insight and thoughtful analysis of some of the major issues related to this timely...

Solar Electricity for over One Billion People and Two Million Jobs by 2020

A planet with two billion cars

Road block: Economists predict that there will be two billion motor vehicles on the roads by 2030, as private vehicle ownership spreads to the developing world. The image shows an urban motorway in Beijing, China. (Photo: Bev Sykes.) From the sheer amount of bad news coming through the 24/7 news cycle, one may get the impression that the world is on the road to apocalypse. To counter this impre...

Life: the first two billion years.

Microfossils, stromatolites, preserved lipids and biologically informative isotopic ratios provide a substantial record of bacterial diversity and biogeochemical cycles in Proterozoic (2500-541 Ma) oceans that can be interpreted, at least broadly, in terms of present-day organisms and metabolic processes. Archean (more than 2500 Ma) sedimentary rocks add at least a billion years to the recorded...