Climate change: trees to the rescue

Bringing nature back into cities, in the form of trees, can help fight global warming. Climate change is the challenge of the century. The last UN Environment Emissions Gap Report warned that, in order to ensure global warming stays below … Read more

Do not avoid risks, but contain them

Brexit and The Wall not only generate news. These issues also provide for interesting comments that ultimately can apply to other, or much broader, areas like the bio-economy. Where continuous development is hampered by risk aversion, learning to identify and … Read more

Can we engineer life? 4.6 Golden rice

Golden rice symbolizes the protracted trench war between proponents and opponents of modern biotechnology. The Swiss Ingo Potrykus of ETH Zürich is the golden man behind the golden rice. With great ardour he defends this controversial rice, and attacks the … Read more

Biocomposites for cars

biocomposites

Every year the European car industry uses around 80,000 tonnes of wood and plant fibres to reinforce composites, instead of synthetic fibres like glass and carbon fibre. Biocomposites have become increasingly popular with car manufacturers because they can reduce vehicle … Read more

Affordable green homes

Some proponents of affordable housing may be under the impression that sustainable homes are more expensive to construct and maintain than those built using traditional means. However, there are actually a number of sustainable practices that can make green homes … Read more

Can we engineer life? 3.2 Planetary boundaries

Mother Earth

‘Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world’ (Nelson Mandela). Hans Tramper is professor emeritus in Bioprocess Technology at Wageningen University and reflects on the development of his subject in a series of essays. … Read more

Innovations: did I miss something?

BiofuelsDigest, the world’s most widely read biofuels daily, as they proudly claim, concluded in May this year that ‘The pace of invention and change is just too strong … to highlight annual or even quarterly or monthly rankings and summaries … Read more

Food security in times of climate change

Solar food for food security

Food security is becoming an important issue even in Europe, where this year’s summer drought has led to significant crop failures. How can future food security be guaranteed in times of climate change? Are digitisation, robotization, biostimulants medium and long-term … Read more