This column in Nature by Adam Briggs, public-health researcher at the University of Oxford, discusses the new UK sugar tax which the FCRN wrote about in our last newsletter.

Recent agri-food studies, including commodity systems, the political economy of agriculture, regional development, and wider examinations of the rural dimension in economic geography and rural sociology have been confronted by three challenges.

This report produced by Food Research Collaboration (FRC) outlines the horticulture sector’s potential to create a shift towards healthier diets in the UK by contributing to overall fruit and vegetable consumption.

This report entitled 'Mitigating risks and vulnerabilities in the energy-food-water nexus in developing countries' analyses global nexus interconnections (such as the dependence of food systems on energy at every stage of the food value chain) and identifies key challenges for food, energy and water security, which include economic and population growth, resource depletion, environmental degradation, climate change and globalisation.

Researchers at the Swedish Environmental Research Institute have investigated how different food choices and changing eating habits affect the environment.

This report written by Andreas Wilkes and Lanying Zhang for the International Institute for Environment and development (IIED) provides an overview of issues in sustainable agriculture in China, the country’s evolution to a modern, high-external input agriculture and the sustainability implications of this development. The report also looks into issues such as land tenure reforms and roles of cooperatives. 

This study looks into how residential landscapes in Chicago, USA, which constitute the largest single urban land use, benefit ecosystems. It argues that even though we often don’t associate modern urban areas with healthy ecosystems, home gardens in urban landscapes can contribute to important ecosystem services.

The Health Council of the Netherlands (the Dutch Dietary Guidelines Committee 2015) has published an updated set of Dutch dietary guidelines.

In this paper, researchers from a number of European and Australian research institutions seek to (1) identify global inequalities in the distribution of environmental pressures, and (2) determine the relative importance of the drivers behind these inequalities.