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Mazingira blog

Mazingira Centre – a role model for environmental research infrastructure in Africa

Climate change threatens the livelihoods of millions of people in Africa. The rise in global temperatures, changes in rainfall, and the increase of extreme weather conditions all pose a serious risk to the agricultural sector and food and nutrition security. At the same time, Africa is currently...

Mazingira blog

Environmental externalities and greenhouse gas emissions from water pans and bomas in pastoral systems

IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Karlsruhe Institute for Technology, and ILRI’s Mazingira Centre join forces to study the role of water pans and bomas in pastoral systems On Oct 25, Gretchen Gettel and Tibor Stigter from IHE Delft arrived at the Mazingira Center in Nairobi. Together with...

Mazingira blog

Digging into Bomas

In a new international research effort, scientists from ILRI’s Mazingira Centre (Kenya), Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (Germany), and the Sustainable Agroecosystems Group at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) are teaming up to take a sharp look at the underlying mechanisms of nitrous oxide (N 2 O)...

ILRI News

What COVID-19 reveals about humanity's relationship with the natural world

Amid the worldwide suffering caused by COVID-19, a silver lining emerged: that because of the slowdown in human activity, nature itself was healing. A widely circulated image on social media summed up the idea: it showed Mount Kilimanjaro’s towering snow-covered peaks, supposedly glimpsed from...

ILRI News

Winning, ‘climate-smart’, ways to feed India’s dairy cows—Jimmy Smith, of ILRI

(The post was written by Kennady Vijayalakshmy, research and communications officer with ILRI in South Asia, with additional editing by Susan MacMillan, ILRI emeritus fellow) Jimmy Smith , director general of the International Livestock Research Institute ( ILRI ), spoke this week (27 May 2021) at...

Opinion and analysis
ILRI News

A no-meat diet everywhere will not solve the climate crisis

People in industrialized regions like the United States of America or Europe are generally urged to eat less meat and animal-source foods as part of a healthier and lower-emissions diet. But such recommendations are not universal solutions in low- or middle-income countries, where livestock are...

Mazingira blog

New study finds that severe undernutrition of cattle increases their methane production

An animal trial in the animal respiration chamber at ILRI’s Mazingira Centre (photo credit: ILRI/ Svenja Marquardt). Livestock production generates significant amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for about 65% of the total emissions from agriculture globally. Of these emissions,...