This report highlights the development and roll-out of a new Global Farm Registry, which will provide a framework to support the global identification, traceability and sustainability performance of farms and producers around the world. It will allow individual producers to voluntarily share their sustainability standards certification status and other production information, to determine their compliance status against other sustainability standards (international, national and retailer, Hospitality and Food Service and brand-owner-specific standards) and to increase their access to new customer and markets.

Agriculture for Impact has just released an online database on Sustainable Intensification  in African agriculture. The database explores innovations and practices from the fields of ecology, genetics and socio-economics to build environmentally sustainable, equitable, productive and resilient ecosystems that improve the well-being of farms, farmers and families.

This report by Ipsos MORI and the British Behavioural Insights Team (who work on behavioural change and nudge-type policies) looks at how our behaviour is largely influenced by what we think others are doing.  The international study based on research from 6 countries (UK, USA, Canada, Australia, France and Germany) shows that people in the UK often overestimate the bad behaviours of other people. It says that British people often think more people are avoiding tax than is really the case, and that they think that more people eat more than the recommended daily amount of sugar than really do.

This report is the result of the work of a Taskforce of academics, industry and policy experts commissioned to examine the resilience of the global food system to extreme weather. The summary report is built on three detailed reports: Climate and global production shocks (Annex A); Review of the responses to production shocks (Annex B) and the Country-level impacts of global grain production shocks (Annex C). The report concludes that the global food system is vulnerable to production shocks caused by extreme weather, and that this risk is growing. It suggests that climate change and a growing population will increase the likelihood of food "shocks" - where the production of staple crops such as rice, wheat and soybean fall by 5-7%, arguing that it will triple in likelihood in just 25 years. The preliminary analysis of limited existing data suggests that the risk of a 1-in-100 year production shock is likely to increase to 1-in-30 or more by 2040.

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.