A new report by IPES Food finds that powerful new alliance between Big Tech corporations (including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alibaba) and Big Ag firms is rapidly gaining control of farming under the guise of innovation. It argues corporate-led digitalization of agriculture is failing to deliver ecological resilience, equity, or sustainability.

This report finds semi-personalised information to consumers is the most effective way to encourage behaviour shifts. Explaining co-benefits to the individual and the environment can make the behaviour easier and more appealing, increasing its likelihood.

This dashboard provides estimates of global environmental impacts and risks driven by consumption and production activities. It links the production of over 160 agricultural commodities across 240 producer countries / territories ‘embedded’ within domestic and international supply chains to selected environmental impacts and risks.

This report by the UK government reveal global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity. The world is already experiencing impacts including crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks. Threats will increase with degradation and intensify with collapse. Without major intervention to reverse the current trend, this is highly likely to continue to 2050 and beyond.

This report examines how biodiversity narratives are represented within food system transformation literature and found that biodiversity is rarely a central theme in food system narratives; it is usually framed indirectly as biodiversity loss or as an instrumental environmental factor. 

A WWF report finds that cocoa cultivation, long associated with deforestation in West Africa, is now driving a dangerous new front of forest loss in some of the world’s most critical tropical ecosystems, including Liberia and the Congo Basin. 

This study tracked GHG emissions arising from croplands and found drained peatlands (35%), rice paddies (35%) and synthetic fertilizer (23%) as the primary contributors. Four crops—rice, maize, oil palm and wheat—accounted for 67% of total emissions. 

This study claims the role of small-scale farmers in national food consumption has been underestimated, particularly in high-income nations, where small farms account for about a third of consumption. By contrast, in regions where small-scale agriculture is widely practised (eg, West Asia, North Africa and East Africa), agricultural imports originate from countries dominated by large-scale farming.

This systematic review of precision agriculture reveals that some academics make claims about PA and sustainability without presenting adequate evidence. Of 444 English-language academic publications on PA and sustainability, it found 54 papers with field-trial or modeling evidence, and most evidence exists for variable rate technologies in grain farming.