Over 50 expert presentations have been given on different aspects of climate change and agriculture in the MICCA Programme webinars during the past 3 years. Examples include recent webinars on conservation agriculture and climate-smart & gender-sensitive aquaculture.

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:

A new analysis by global non-profit CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, looks at how some of the most recognizable household brands are managing climate change. Their report argues that many of the world’s biggest food, beverage and tobacco brands are missing their biggest opportunity to mitigate climate risks.

Tracking intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs):  what are the implications for greenhouse gas emissions in 2030? is the title of a policy paper produced by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science.  Parties to the UNFCCC agreed to set out their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) at the 20th Conference of the Parties (COP20) in Lima, Peru, in December 2014. The policy paper, which is intended to inform decision-makers in the public, private and third sectors, considers whether the INDCs submitted so far are consistent with the 2°C limit.

A new paper published in Global Environmental Change analyses 50 years of data from FAO (from 1961 to 2011) to try to understand the drivers for global agricultural land use change. Pasture forms the largest component of agricultural land globally, but previous research on agricultural land use has focused disproportionately on the role of arable crops. 

In this comment piece in Nature, a group of researchers argue that putting a price on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to curb emissions must form the centrepiece of any comprehensive climate-change policy. They point out that the current price of carbon remains much too low relative to the hidden environmental, health and societal costs of burning a tonne of coal or a barrel of oil. The global average price is below zero, once half a trillion dollars of fossil-fuel subsidies are factored in.

This article in Nature Climate Change argues that the global climate and agriculture research community needs to put increased emphasis on mixed crop-livestock farm systems and their interplay with climate adaptation and mitigation. Written by authors from CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the piece outlines mixed farming systems' value to national development, climate adaptation and resilience building, farmers’ livelihoods and the globe’s food demand.

The demand for meat is expected to double by 2050. Projections indicate that expanding the livestock industry to meet this demand would exceed biophysical limitations, dangerously exacerbating climate change and biodiversity loss. This paper uses an anthropological approach to explore an alternative meat source that not only avoids livestock’s pitfalls, but targets introduced pest species that have a history of profound destruction within Australian ecosystems.