FCRN has previously highlighted the new Swedish dietary guidelines in a blog-post, “Environmental concerns now in Sweden’s newly launched dietary guidelines” by the Swedish researcher and FCRN collaborator Elin Röös, where she also talks to representatives from the Swedish Food Agency about the challenges involved in writing the new guidelines. This report is now available in full in English. 

This paper, published in OECD Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Papers is aimed at showcasing the growing evidence base on supply-side (agricultural) greenhouse gas mitigation for reducing the emissions intensity of agriculture while maintaining or increasing production. It does this by reviewing 65 recent international studies of cost-effectiveness covering 181 individual activities and by explaining some of the key concepts involved in this field.

An international research project co-led by the University of East Anglia suggests that international agencies have overestimated Chinas carbon emissions for more than 10 years. The research team re-evaluated emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and cement production from 1950-2013 and their results suggest that China produced 2.9 gigatonnes less carbon between 2000-2013 than previous estimates of its cumulative emissions.

This paper reviewed data from six national studies to quantify food waste within the EU and its associated loss of water and nitrogen resources in the EU as well as the uncertainties of these values.

This study is the first to quantify the relationship between human population growth and energy use on an international scale. It explains how global population growth has begun, in the past 50 years, to catch up with energy consumption for the first time in 500 years.  Until that point, each generation had produced more energy per person than its predecessor, which allowed for an increase in Earth's carrying capacity and in the number of people it could sustain at equilibrium.

This Bloomberg article and video interview discusses the new recommendations published to inform the development of the 2015 US dietary guidelines.

These two articles in Foreign Policy discuss the role of power and agency to solve our global water and food problems. In the first article “Don’t Let Food Be the Problem - Producing too much food is what starves the planet” Professor Olivier De Schutter reflects on lessons learnt during his work over the past 6 years as UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. He argues that international action cannot solve the food crises without local responses. He writes “These interconnected systems of overproduction won’t feed the world.

An article in Beverage Daily covers the recent FCRN-Chatham House (EAT-funded) report “Policies and actions to shift eating patterns: What works.” The article highlights a key conclusion of the report:

More than a third of the world's adults have never heard of climate change according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change. The study is based on the results of a Gallup World Poll undertaken in 2007-08 which collected responses in 119 countries . As reported in a Carbon brief blog-post the poll asked people: ‘How much do you know about global warming or climate change?’ Those who were aware of the issue were then asked the follow-up question: ‘How serious a threat is global warming to you and your family?’