To examine what the concept of the green economy means in practice for European countries, and to evaluate their progress in achieving such a transition, in 2012 the European Environment Agency (EEA) initiated a new series of environmental indicator reports. The first two reports in the series focused on green economy and the European environment, addressing resource efficiency and resilience and the links between European resource demand, environmental degradation and changes in human wellbeing.

A study led by University of Minnesota's David Tilman finds that shifting modern diets towards healthier, Mediterranean diets could improve quality of life and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The team synthesized data on the environmental costs of food production, diet trends and population growth, and showed the health and environment costs of continuing our current health trends as compared to shifting to a healthier diet.

This paper looks at the environmental costs of food production and consumption. It offers an updated account of the GHG emissions associated with production of U.S. food losses at the retail/institution and consumer level and also considers the effects of a shift in diets away from current US consumption patterns towards those recommended by USDA dietary guidelines.

The International Dairy Federation (IDF), the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the IFCN Dairy Research Network (IFCN) have collaborated on an extensive study on international dairy feeding systems to explore how differences within these systems for dairy cows, water buffaloes, sheep, and goats and between large and smallholders can affect a range of issues - from the nutritional content of the milk to the level of GHG emissions involved in the production process. Each of the three organizations had differing stakes in the research. 

The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT)  has launched a new report on sustainable diets - People, Plate and Planet, describing dietary choices that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pressures on land. The report considers nutrition, GHG emissions and land use and states that the most significant impact on these areas comes from what we eat, not where it is from or how much packaging there is around it.

This new paper in Global Environmental Change, builds on a 1997 study published in Nature on the global value of ecosystem services, and estimates the changes since then.