New book on sustainable urban agriculture.

A group of investors, worth $1.25 trillion, has contributed to a report calling for food companies to change the way in which they include protein in their products to reduce environmental risk. The FAIRR initiative’s report – The Future of Food: The Investment Case for a Protein Shake Up – argues that forward-looking investors and businesses should act now to help shape a new market in sustainable protein, with less of this macronutrient coming from animals, and more from plants (and perhaps from insects and algae).

The EU uses more than its fair share of global land; in 2010 the amount of land needed to satisfy our consumption of agricultural goods and services was 43% greater than the land available within its boundaries. This report stresses the responsibility that the EU has to measure, monitor and reduce its global land footprint.

In this short article, the authors argue that the explicit absence of the ‘right to food’ in the Sustainable Development Goals is unjust and is due to opposition by the US and a self-contradictory position by the EU. The Sustainable Development Goals do name access to water, health and education as universally guaranteed human rights.

There is increasing evidence that human demands on natural systems are accelerating and could affect the stability and services provided by these systems. This paper aims to aid understanding of the temporal and spatial variability of human pressures on natural systems, which provides a foundation for environmental damage mitigation. Recent advances in remote sensing have allowed great development in mapping of human pressures, particularly in forested areas. Other pressures, such as roads and pasture lands, have by comparison been overlooked.

The agricultural sector is particularly vulnerable to climate change; a small increase of 1 degree Celsius can have significant negative impacts on crop yields, especially in the tropics. Global economic losses in production of three major crops (wheat, maize, and barley) attributed to climate change in the recent past are estimated at approximately US$5 billion per year.

This study evaluates the attainability of sustainable targets for better integrating food security and environmental impacts. Many studies have looked at how much food production could increase given a plausible mitigation solution, for example if food waste was halved from 24% to 12% then an additional 1 billion people could be fed. These studies, however, lack a temporal component that this study attempts to include, which enables evaluation of whether these advances can keep pace with projected increases in human demand.

This study compares real world observations of the age of carbon in soils, to soil carbon’s age as represented in earth system models that are used to make climate change projections. It then explores the implications of the results, by modelling expected future levels of carbon storage in global soils, occurring in response to increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. To illustrate the difference, modelled increases in soil carbon storage are contrasted both before and after updating earth systems models to reflect these real-world observations.

In Sweden two of the largest supermarkets in the country have launched campaigns aimed at creating increased consumer awareness around the environmental impact of meat, encouraging consumers to lower their intake of meat and promoting plant-based alternatives.