Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a water-based nanotechnology formulation that improves how agricultural pesticides adhere to plant leaves, reducing chemical waste and environmental runoff while increasing effectiveness in wind and rain.

Bionema Group Ltd, a Swansea University spin-out specialising in biological crop protection and sustainable agriculture, has been awarded the King’s Award for Enterprise: Sustainable Development 2026.

A new study published in Big Earth Data presents phenological metrics derived from Earth observation (EO) satellite time series—such as greening onset, senescence, and growing season length—which are essential for crop monitoring but challenged by the massive scale of EO data exceeding local processing capacities, and introduces a free, open-source Web Crop Phenology Metrics Service (WCPMS) built on the Brazil Data Cube platform for server-side extraction from large datasets. It further demonstrates the tool’s effectiveness by estimating soybean sowing dates in Brazil using phenological metrics and validating the results against field data.

With global population growth driving unprecedented infrastructure demand, cement production, a major carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitter, requires sustainable alternatives. A study by Dr Fakhruddin from Hasanuddin University presents a greener concrete mix using sugarcane waste. Results show that Class C fly ash-based geopolymer concrete with 5% sugarcane bagasse ash replacement and polypropylene fibers improved compressive strength by 41% while reducing CO₂ emissions by 25–30% compared to traditional cement.