This report details the results of a study commissioned by Natural England – it looks at how some of the options under the UK’s Environmental Stewardship scheme provide various ecosystem services which are important to agricultural production and productivity. 

The Food Climate Research Network and the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food have jointly published a new report entitled: Sustainable intensification in agriculture. Navigating a course through competing food system priorities.

Defra’s Green Food Project has published its report. This project was tasked to consider how production and consumption could change in the future, and whether/how it was possible to reconcile the goals of increasing production and improving the environment. 

A new report published by UNEP argues that the world needs to focus on maintaining and boosting the underlying ecological foundations that support food production to help ensure food security for a growing population. 

In 2009, Rockström et al published a paper in Nature which proposed the concept of nine planetary boundaries, which we must keep within if we are not to suffer potentially catastrophic consequences. More recently Nature has published an interesting opinion piece on the boundaries idea.  

PBL, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, has published a new report arguing that the impact of the proposed greening measures of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the sustainable development of agriculture appears to be relatively small. 

The European Environment Agency has published a study on environmental tax reform (ETR).  ETR is defined as 'reform of the national tax system where there is a shift of the burden of taxes, for example on labour, to environmentally damaging activities, such as resource use or pollution'. 

The UK Government’s Carbon Plan was published in December 2011. It sets out how government’s proposals and policies for meeting the first four carbon budgets - legally binding limits on the amount of emissions that may be produced in successive five-year periods, beginning in 2008.

This interesting paper by FCRN mailing list member John Ingram, makes the important (but often neglected) point that food security is not just an issue of production, but rather an outcome of multiple social, economic and environmental factors, operating at different scales.