This is a baseline report by research consortium INHERIT funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme. The INHERIT project aims to identify effective inter-sectoral policies, interventions and innovations that enable a ‘triple win’ by reducing environmental impacts, improving health and wellbeing, and generating greater health equity.

This book, edited by Jessica Duncan and Megan Bailey, includes chapters on a wide range of topics such as cultured meat, aquaculture, land rights and Arctic food security initiatives.

A small amount of single-cell protein has been produced using electricity and carbon dioxide alone. The researchers working on this believe the protein produced in this way could be further developed for use as food and animal feed. The protein can be produced anywhere that renewable energy, such as solar energy, is available.

The EU40’s Animal Taskforce has produced a short report which outlines a proposed roadmap to supporting the EU livestock sector towards more sustainable practices.

In this article a group of American researchers provide commentary on how sustainable applications of integrated agricultural systems (IAS) can be designed to enhance all ecosystem services, without compromising the land’s resilience. The authors describe IAS as an interactive and synergistic resource transfer between multiple agricultural enterprises over space and/or time. 

This paper proposes a solution to the problems associated with the high inefficiencies and indirect detrimental environmental impacts caused by reactive nitrogen use in agriculture.The researchers suggest that land-based agriculture could be bypassed and that Haber Bosch derived nitrogen could be used directly for reactor based microbial protein production. The advantages of microbial protein production are summarised, as are the opportunities and technical challenges for large-scale production. The authors emphasise that, aside from the scientific innovation required, the main challenge to address is obtaining acceptability from regulators and consumers.

This book is based on the papers that were presented and discussed at a workshop with the group “System Innovation towards Sustainable Agriculture” (SISA), an initiative by researchers from ‘Wageningen University & Research’ in the Netherlands (WUR) and the ‘Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique’ in France (INRA).