Scientists and other experts from ACToday, the first Columbia World Project, joined the former New York Times journalist Andrew Revkin for an online web seminar on May 7 to discuss the intersection of food, climate and coronavirus.
ACToday is a Columbia World Project that aims to combat hunger by increasing climate knowledge in six countries that are particularly dependent on agriculture and vulnerable to the effects of climate change and fluctuations: Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Senegal and Vietnam.
The event – “Feeding Humanity as a Pandemic Disrupts a Heating Planet” – was produced and hosted by Andrew Revkin, founding director of the Earth Institute's new Initiative on Communication and Sustainability.
In the discussion, members of the ACToday team offered updates on the project’s work, and discussed how both climate and the coronavirus will affect food supply chains, and people’s ability to feed themselves. They also discussed how university-led projects like ACToday can help take on major challenges like those brought about by this pandemic.
“It's a profound moment of history that we’re living through right now,” Revkin said, opening the event: “Coronavirus is representative of the global biological connectedness that is matching our climatological connectedness and shaping risk in ways that are very hard for our current systems to deal with.”
Watch the full webcast here: