UK farmers may be given targets to reverse soil damage and restore soil health by 2030, as part of an agricultural bill to be brought before parliament later this year.

A report from the European Commission Directorate-General for the Environment reviews environmental, social and economic aspects of palm oil production and consumption, and evaluates existing palm oil sustainability initiatives.

In this paper, researchers from the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission investigate the extent to which variation in nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions may offset or enhance the mitigation effects of carbon sequestration in arable European soils. They employ a biogeochemical model with input data from ~8000 soil sampling locations to quantify CO2 and N2O flux associated with different agricultural practices aimed at carbon (C) mitigation.

This paper sets out principles of what the authors call “just conservation”, aiming to find a balance between the conservation of nature and social justice. The authors propose two principles to guide decision-making: the non-anthropocentric principle and the safeguard principle.

This article explains the technological changes behind the three-fold increase in global crop production between 1961 and 2014, i.e. since the Green Revolution. It examines the 58 countries that are responsible for 95% of food production and assesses the impacts of changes in land use, inputs and efficiency.

This book, edited by Joshua Zeunert and Tim Waterman, sets out a wide array of interdisciplinary knowledge on landscapes, agriculture, food and sustainability.

This report from the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) considers the relationships between land use, land degradation and sustainable development goals.

A perspective piece and an editorial have featured in the same edition of Biological Conservation (March 2018): both tackle a recent debate among conservation biologists as to whether at a local level biodiversity or species richness is changing and in what direction.

A report by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council finds that negative emissions technologies (NETs) have ‘limited realistic potential’ and cannot be relied upon to remove carbon at the rate envisaged in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios for avoiding dangerous climate change.