The UK government’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has published a set of resources on “enabling a natural capital approach” (ENCA) to guide policymakers and decisionmakers. 

This report from the UK’s Office for National Statistics estimates the value of ten ecosystems services provided by natural capital in Scotland. Information on agricultural biomass (including fish capture) and carbon sequestration may be of particular interest to FCRN readers.

This lecture from the Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School addresses emerging methods of measuring natural capital and assessing ecological services in the context of economic analysis.

This book, edited by Subramanian Senthilkannan Muthu, examines the development and implementation of a variety of indicators of sustainability for the food system.

This paper by FCRN member Dana Boyer examines how policy interventions at the city scale can affect three environmental outcomes of food production: greenhouse gas emissions, water use and land use. It uses India’s capital city Delhi as a case study. It sets out to assess the magnitude of city-scale food system actions as compared to certain actions which can be taken beyond the city boundary.

This book deals with past legacies and emerging challenges associated with agriculture production, water and environmental management, and local and national development. It offers a critical interpretation of the tensions associated with the failures of mainstream regulatory regimes and the impacts of global agri-food chains.

This paper presents a food sustainability assessment tool called FOODSCALE which contributes to the scientific evidence on the social, economic and environmental impacts of food provision in large-scale organizations, facilitating analysis and potentially subsequent action.

The authors of this paper have tried to develop a framework to apply the concept of planetary boundaries to national level decision making and to discuss what a country’s ‘fair share’ of Earth’s safe operating space could be.

Performing full life cycle assessment on foods and diets is a data- and resource-intensive undertaking and as a result many studies tend to adopt a simplified approach, for example by limiting the number of food studied (in the case of diets), using proxy data, or limiting the system boundaries (cradle to farm gate; cradle to retailer – ie. not the full cradle to the consumer’s mouth).