This new handbook, edited by Danny Hunter, Luigi Guarino, Charles Spillane and Peter C. McKeown, presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of the current knowledge of agricultural biodiversity.

The new report by World Wildlife Fund, Appetite for Destruction, highlights the vast amount of land that is needed to grow the crops used for animal feed, including in some of the planet’s most vulnerable areas such as the Amazon, Congo Basin and the Himalayas.

This new book by Bioversity International summarizes the most recent evidence on how to use agrobiodiversity to provide nutritious foods through harnessing natural processes.

This study by US- and New Zealand-based researchers estimates the effect of elevated CO2 (eCO2) on the edible protein content of crop plants, and subsequently on protein intake and protein deficiency risk globally, by country. The basis for this study is that 76% of the world’s population derives most of their daily protein from plants, and that a meta-analysis by Myers, et al. (2014) revealed that plant nutrient content (of various types including protein, iron and zinc) changes under elevated CO2.

Certain cereal grains and other crop plants have been shown to have lower iron concentrations when grown under elevated CO2. This study by researchers from Massachusetts, USA, examined diets from 152 countries to investigate which groups of people might be most at risk of iron deficiency as a result of increasing CO2 emissions, on the basis of current dietary composition, the current global prevalence of iron deficiency, and projected CO2 emissions up to the year 2050.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) have developed an Excel spreadsheet that can assist in calculating the nutrient value of food that is wasted. 

In this information note from the CGIAR programme on Climate change, Agriculture and Food security (CCAFS), researchers present a rough estimate of the proportion of global agricultural emissions that can be attributed to smallholder farmers in developing countries.

This paper shows that a huge amount of nutrients is wasted each day in the US food supply, and that much of this waste includes important nutrients that are currently under-consumed in the US. It is one of the first studies to calculate the nutritional value of food wasted in the US at the retail and consumer levels, shining a light on just how much protein, fibre and other important nutrients end up in the landfill in a single year.

This research links the self-reported Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ) data of Swedish participants, to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) data of carbon footprint for food products. The results of this study indicate that a self-selected diet low in diet related greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) provides comparable intake of nutrients as a diet high in GHGE, and adheres to dietary guidelines for most nutrients.