This report from the Corporate Accountability Lab explores how American fair trade organisations protect the image of corporations more than the rights of their workers by analysing case studies on horticultural farms in Mexico.

This book discusses how the net zero transition and associated changes in land use, farming and diets could affect the UK food system.

Researchers from the University of Manchester argue that the widespread switch to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how academia can function in the future without flying, to reduce carbon emissions. They set out recommendations on how to retain low levels of aviation, including combining necessary trips, supporting cultural changes by improving virtual methods of working, and considering using carbon budgets for travel.

This paper models the impacts of a “degrowth” approach to reducing the environmental impacts of the global food system. It finds that reducing and redistributing income, alone, leads to only limited climate mitigation from food systems, because the shift towards unsustainable diets occurs at low income levels. Instead, a “sustainable transformation” scenario (incorporating income redistribution, and “efficiency-based” carbon tax, a shift towards the EAT-Lancet planetary health diet, and reduced food waste) is able to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions for the food system by 2100.

This report from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food presents 14 case studies of countries that have incorporated food systems into their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) towards meeting the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. It finds that most of the 14 countries have focused their climate efforts on food production as opposed to other parts of the food system such as diet, waste, processing and transport. Many of the assessed NDCs emphasise agroecology and regenerative agriculture as well as ecosystem protection. While many NDCs discuss food systems resilience in the face of climate change, few have put concrete adaptation measures in place.

This report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reviews the evidence on climate change’s impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity and people. It finds that there is a greater than 50% chance that global warming will reach or exceed 1.5°C (above the 1850-1900 baseline) in the near term, even under very low emissions scenarios, and that human-induced climate change has already caused “widespread adverse impacts” for nature and for people.

This book presents a toolkit of agroecological methods of farming, based on case studies including the author’s farm, Huxhams Cross Farm in Devon, England.

This report from the United Nations Environment Programme assesses the implications of cutting global methane emissions, including those from agriculture, fossil fuels and waste. It finds that reducing human-caused methane emissions by 45% this decade would avoid nearly 0.3°C of warming by the 2040s as well as have significant co-benefits in reducing premature deaths, asthma-related hospital visits and crop losses (related to ozone exposure, as methane promotes ground-level ozone formation) and work hours lost to extreme heat (related to climate change).

Academics and students from Cornell University have released a website, Our Changing Menu, that tells the story of climate change using food. Aimed at a general audience and accompanying the book of the same name, it explains climate change, describes how the production of foods such as avocados, olive oil and beef might change, and offers solutions. A searchable food ingredient database, which will continue to be updated, shows how selected ingredients are expected to be affected by climate change.