This article in Environment Magazine (MIT press) discusses so called “ESG” investments - environmental, social, and governance  investment criteria. The article charts the history of socially and environmentally responsible investments and argues that screening of assets with environmental, social, or governance parameters in mind is growing.

Unsustainable patterns of consumption and production threaten global development and environmental well-being. Ensuring sustainable consumption and production should take a life cycle approach, and central to this is the development of product sustainability information (PSI). This publication provides four key recommendations in order to advance a coherent and context-relevant use of PSI that is useful for consumer decision-making:

This report highlights the development and roll-out of a new Global Farm Registry, which will provide a framework to support the global identification, traceability and sustainability performance of farms and producers around the world. It will allow individual producers to voluntarily share their sustainability standards certification status and other production information, to determine their compliance status against other sustainability standards (international, national and retailer, Hospitality and Food Service and brand-owner-specific standards) and to increase their access to new customer and markets.

A new report from at Cranfield University suggests that increasing the production and consumption of frozen food in the UK can play a significant role in delivering the government’s 2020 and 2050 food security targets. The report, Frozen Food and Food Security in the UK, was produced by sustainability experts at Cranfield University on behalf of the British Frozen Food Federation (BFFF).

In a recent brief for the UN Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR) a group of researchers, including Tara Garnett of the FCRN, proposed that well-designed policies targeting the demand for particular foods could simultaneously improve the health of the global population and achieve environmental sustainability.

Abstract This book By Nora McKeon fills a gap in the literature by setting food security in the context of evolving global food governance. Today’s food system generates hunger alongside of food waste, burgeoning health problems, massive greenhouse gas emissions. Applying food system analysis to review how the international community has addressed food issues since World War II, this book proceeds to explain how actors link up in corporate global food chains and in the local food systems that feed most of the world’s population.

A set of papers from the First International Conference on Global Food Security is now available online. The conference attracted 600 participants from 65 countries. All of the papers in the special issue are open access for the first year and available here.

Green Monday is a global sustainability initiative that was designed to promote green lifestyle choices.  In this video Phil Valko, assistant vice chancellor for sustainability at Washington University in St. Louis, talks about the global Green Monday initiative and how making a small change to one’s food choices can have a major impact.

The first progress report of A Better Retailing Climate initiative has been published. It describes how retailers since 2005 have improved their performance against the environmental targets set out in the initiative, and that they have: