More than 150 Nobel Prize and World Food Prize laureates are making an urgent plea for world leaders to invest in “moonshot” technologies to address an increasingly dire global hunger crisis that is only getting worse in the face of climate change.
In an open letter published Tuesday, the experts — luminaries in fields spanning climate science, economics, physics, chemistry, medicine, and agriculture — seek political will and financial support for agricultural research and innovation that will help alter the current trajectory, which they call a “tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand.”
Today, more than 700 million people worldwide don’t have enough food to eat, and those figures are likely to get worse: Climate change is set to decrease productivity of major food staples at a time when the world is projected to add some 1.5 billion people by midcentury.
About the author
Tania Karas@TaniaKaras
Tania Karas is a Senior Editor at Devex, where she edits coverage on global development and humanitarian aid in the Americas. Previously, she managed the digital team for The World, where she oversaw content production for the website, podcast, newsletter, and social media platforms. Tania also spent three years as a foreign correspondent in Greece, Turkey, and Lebanon, covering the Syrian refugee crisis and European politics. She started her career as a staff reporter for the New York Law Journal, covering immigration and access to justice.
