BP has published a report ‘Energy Outlook 2030’, which projects future energy trends and factors that could affect them, based on views of likely economic and population growth and developments in policy and technology. This year’s edition examines the revolution in shale gas and tight oil, which is driving America’s energy revival.

A new report by Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, calls for the UK Budget 2013 to implement a sugary drinks duty to fund a ‘Children’s Future Fund’ for spending on programmes to improve children’s health and future well-being.

A report funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) identifies the ‘hotspots’ where zoonoses impose significant burdens, but also where zoonoses management is targeted at poor livestock keepers and consumers. The report maps emerging zoonoses as distinct from other emerging disease events, provides maps of regional agroecosystems, and summarises numbers of livestock, people and poor livestock keepers by system as well as by zoonoses context.

A paper published in the journal Annual Review of Environment and Resources explores the connection between climate change and food systems, and assesses and the impact the former willl have on agricultural yields and earnings, food prices, reliability of delivery, food quality and food safety. It also discusses a number of interventions that could mitigate this impact.

A study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science reviews the Database on Raising Intelligence to find interventions that increased children’s intelligence. One such intervention involved supplementing infants with long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, and the study concludes that this does indeed have a positive impact on children’s IQ. 

A new FCRN article – “Food sustainability: problems, perspectives and solutions” –  has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Nutrition Society.

A study in Psychological Science examined the effect certain communication strategies have on pressing social issues. The study found that public campaigns that call upon people to think and act interdependently (as opposed to independently) may be counterproductive for many Americans. The experiments demonstrated that a person’s way of thinking and motivation to act are deeply tied to the cultural frameworks that shape their social worlds, findings that have important implications for those working to promote social and behavioral change.

A study by the University of Virginia and the Polytechnic University of Milan, and currently published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a global quantitative assessment of the water-grabbing phenomenon. The study shows that foreign land acquisition involves 62 “grabbed” countries and 41 “grabbers” and affects every continent except Antarctica.