Agricultural waste that is usually burned or left to rot could play a far bigger role in tackling climate change if it were instead used in long-lasting building materials, according to new research from the University of East London (UEL).

Venkatesan Sundaresan, a Distinguished Professor of plant biology and plant sciences at UC Davis, has been awarded a Gates Foundation grant to develop self-cloning crops for Indian farmers. The five-year, $4.9 million project is a collaboration with researchers Myeong-Je Cho at UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), Viswanathan Chinnusamy at the ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR-IARI), New Delhi and Ravi Maruthachalam at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER-Thiruvananthapuram). The project aims to sustainably improve agricultural productivity by producing high-yielding crops that clone themselves, allowing farmers to save their superior seeds from one season to the next.

Within the next few decades, intensifying heatwaves could expose a significant share of Europe’s cattle to dangerous levels of heat stress. New research maps where and how millions of animals may be affected by mid-century.