Over the last few months, we’ve had the pleasure of welcoming our collaborator and advisory board member Elena Lazos Chavero to TABLE’s Oxford office. Elena is a social anthropologist based at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico since 1992 whose work focuses on rural conflicts and development, food sovereignty, the institutional dynamics of social-ecological systems, and much more. In a fascinating discussion over a cup of tea this autumn, TABLE researchers Tamsin Blaxter and Hester van Hensbergen spoke with Elena about her career, the complexities of Mexican food politics, and the ever evolving meanings of food sovereignty and food security. You can read the conversation, which has been edited for length, below.

The UN Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Climate Change (‘COP’) has been getting steadily bigger over its almost 30-year history. Does size matter in the climate agenda, and how does the format of the conference further, or limit, its goal of international cooperation? This article considers the impact of expansion, and what it means for food systems. Ruth attended COP28 as part of a role with another organisation, Sri Lanka-based think tank SLYCAN Trust. She also attended the 2022 COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh as an employee of the Scottish Government. 

Food systems actors are increasingly turning to stakeholder participation to ‘co-produce’ solutions to challenges. At a workshop on participatory research, blog authors Soujanya Mantravadi and Hannah Gardiner noticed differences in understanding of participatory concepts between their two disciplines - industrial information systems and food justice in communities, respectively. In this blog they consider the implications of those differences for community-industry collaboration and highlight some key practices for working across disciplines.Bramble H Gardiner (they/them) is a community activist and PhD researcher in food justice/systems and social science at the University of Plymouth. Soujanya Mantravadi (she/her) is an engineer and postdoc in industrial systems and supply chains at the University of Cambridge.

As many welcome the novel spotlight on food systems at COP28, the UN Climate Change Conference taking place in the United Arab Emirates this month, authors Cleo Verkuijl and Jeff Sebo call for a renewed focus on animal welfare and the ethical price being paid for a narrow and inattentive focus on emissions reduction. About the authors: Cleo Verkuijl is a scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute US and a visiting research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Programme. She has served as a coordinating lead author of three UN climate policy assessments. Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. His most recent book is Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves.

Georgie Barber of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission puts forward the case for Land Use Frameworks as a vital tool for meeting climate, nature, food and health challenges, and considers the features that determine their success. 

Following last year's popular event series, TABLE will again be hosting a series of 3 online events this autumn leading up to COP28:Nitrogen, climate change and food: showing the connections on 16 October at 5pm BSTCan nature-based solutions deliver on their promise? on 31 October at 5pm GMTChanging diets to tackle climate change - what’s the role of government? on 14 November at 5pm GMTPlease join us as we explore questions regarding the evidence and values behind debates around food systems, nature and governance.Update: These events have already occurred. Please use the links below to watch the event recordings.

TABLE’s director, Tara Garnett, gave a talk at the Wageningen University & Research (WUR) symposium on the environmental impact of food systems earlier this summer. We are summarising the talk here, because it provides a good introduction to TABLE’s approach to food system debates.