This online book, published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, explores Africa's potential for intensifying agricultural production through ecological agriculture — the integration of traditional, conservation oriented farming techniques with modern science and technology.

Building on discussions from the Conference on Ecological Agriculture, held in Ethiopia in 2008, it outlines past experiences such as lessons learned from the Green Revolution in Asia; trends in African agricultural knowledge, science and technology for development; and climate change implications for agriculture.

The book concludes that ecological agriculture can benefit smallholder farmers in several ways such as helping to increase Africa's productivity, and therefore improving food security, and helping farmers adapt to climate change by making agro-ecosystems more resilient to stress. But scaling up ecological agriculture will require policy support as well as additional resources and information.

This paper reports the results of a systematic review of the impacts of climate change on crop productivity in Africa and South Asia. The study, funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), assessed eight food crops — rice, wheat, maize, sorghum, millet, cassava, yam, plantain and sugarcane — that make up more than 80 per cent of agricultural production in these regions. Its findings aim to inform DFID's policies, allocation of resources and other practices according to the need for a stronger focus on evidence-informed decision-making on agriculture in a changing climate. The report provides background information; a detailed account of the review protocol and methodology; the data extraction strategy; data collection; meta-analyses; a synthesis of results; and key findings for all crops organised by region. It recognises that climate change will worsen environmental conditions that already affect crops, such as heat, drought, salinity and submergence in water.

As global temperatures rise, vector-borne disease is set to increase in the developing world but patterns will vary across countries. This review looks at how the prevalence of vector-borne disease will change in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America.

As the authors explain, urbanisation levels will determine which diseases are likely to hit hardest. For example, dengue fever is a largely urban disease and will affect South America, where over 70 per cent of the population live in cities, far more than it will Sub-Saharan Africa, where less than 30 per cent of people live in urban areas. Malaria, by contrast, will have a bigger impact in Africa.

As ecosystems change, so will the distribution of vector species. Some will find their habitats expanded. A positive note is that most vectors cannot survive above about 40 degrees Celsius, so regions in which warming tips the temperature over this level could well see a drop in vector-borne disease — this is starting to be seen in Senegal, for example.

But the precise extent to which climate variability affects vector-borne disease is yet unknown, say the authors, which hampers evidence-based policy change.