More than three-quarters of the world's food crops are at least partly dependent on pollination and in many regions over 40 percent of the bees and the butterflies are threatened with extinction, according to a new report entitled Thematic Assessment of Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production.

The UK’s official dietary guidelines were updated in March 2016. The Carbon Trust has undertaken a useful analysis of the environmental implications of the new plate. FCRN member John Kazer (Footprint Certification Manager at The Carbon Trust) provides the following summary of the analysis here:

In this correspondence article in The Lancet researchers from Universities of Oxford and Cambridge analyse the conclusions of the Green budget report. The Green budget is an annual report published by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), ICAEW and the Nuffield foundation, which considers the issues and challenges facing the UK as its Government sets the country’s budget for the coming financial year.

This article in Nature Climate Change titled Cropping frequency and area response to climate variability can exceed yield response, suggests that previous studies may have underestimated the impact of climate change on the world’s food supply.

Poor households in developing countries are sometimes included in livestock programmes by humanitarian organisations whereby they are given a cow, a pair of oxen, or a herd of goats. This paper analyses the impacts on the food security of recipients in these kinds of programmes and finds that the effect is positive. 

In this paper, researchers from a range of research institutions investigate the likely ‘transformational adaptations’ that will be necessary over the next century to maintain agricultural yields in sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper analyses a questionnaire for measuring greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) from diets – the food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) or Meal-Q.  The paper compares the Meal-Q questionnaire to a 7-day weighed food record and this is the first study validating diet-related GHGE from a FFQ.

This paper in Science discusses the potential of yield increase incentives as a way of convincing farmers to save land to protect biodiversity rather than increasing farmland.   The increase of agricultural land is one of the leading causes of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions in tropical countries. This paper argues that increasing yields on existing agricultural land can provide farmers with the incentive to spare land for wildlife and nature.

This paper finds that the EU’s climate targets for 2050 for methane and nitrous oxide can be met by a combination of technological improvements in agriculture (found to have a potential to cut emissions by nearly 50% in optimistic scenarios) and through a reduction in beef consumption. The study authors argue that these targets can be met even with a continued high consumption of pork and poultry.