The Food Foundation, a UK think tank that presents policy solutions to the public health challenges produced by the food system, has published its initial response to the Government’s spending review – which sets out departmental spending priorities over the next five years. The response focusses on the Review’s implications for food insecurity and public health spending.

Over 75 top nutrition scientists and medical experts gathered in Boston in October 2015 at the Finding Common Ground Conference, convened by the non-profit Oldways to try to agree on principles for a healthy diet (primarily aimed at a U.S. audience). Oldways is a food and nutrition education organization aiming to inspire healthy eating through cultural food traditions and lifestyles. The meeting was attended by a diverse range of experts, many vocal proponents of particular types of diets (vegan, paleo, low-fat, Mediterranean etc.) and is described to have led to some heated debates.

The local food movement is one of the most active of current civil engagement social movements. This work presents primary evidence from over 900 documents, interviews, and participant observations, and provides the first descriptive history of local food movement national policy achievements in the US, from 1976 to 2013, and in the UK, from 1991 to 2013, together with reviews of both the American and British local food movements. It provides a US-UK comparative context, significantly updating earlier comparisons of American, British and European farm and rural policies.

This discussion paper entitled The Triangle: The Evolution and Future of Industrial Animal Agriculture in the U.S., China, and Brazil provides an analysis of the modern livestock industry and of so called factory farming. The paper focuses on the connections between the three most important countries in today´s meat and feed industries: the United States, China, and Brazil. The underlying emphasis of the paper is that as living standards improve in emerging economies, rising consumption of animal products is one of the factors fuelling the expansion of Western-style, large-scale, intensive animal farming and feed crop monoculture.

This brief from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) shows that a third of countries involved in COP21 and who have submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) have included targets for mitigating emissions from farming in their plans, but for developing countries such plans are conditional on receiving international financial support.

WHO has released a first set of Climate Change and Health Country Profiles that provide a snapshot of up-to-date information about the current and future impacts of climate change on human health. The Climate and Health Country Profile project is an ongoing initiative that supports interested WHO Member States in finalising country profiles through a country consultation process.

Reducing global meat consumption will be critical to keeping global warming below the ‘danger level’ of two degrees Celsius, the main goal of the 2015 climate negotiations in Paris, according to this new report by Chatham House.

This report, Food Futures, by the UK’s waste agency WRAP, looks at a broad range of food sustainability challenges for the future and at possible solutions.

Research published in Nature Climate Change shows that accelerated erosion due to agricultural management is a major threat to food security and soil sustainability. Erosion is a natural process that continually shapes the land surface. The removal of soil also removes carbon contained in that soil. With erosion removing top soil it removes the layer of the soil that has the greatest concentration of carbon.