This report is produced as follow-on work to the Green Food Project, which focused on sustainable consumption and production. The Green Food Project report in July 2012 concluded that follow-on work was required to enable a broader and more sophisticated debate around the roles that diet and consumption play in the sustainability of the whole food system.

This new paper in Marine Policy suggests that eco-label improvements can be made by integrating the carbon footprints of products in sustainability assessments (eco-labels, sustainability certification, or consumer seafood sustainability guides).

This literature review, undertaken by the Food Climate Research Network and Chatham House, and in association with EAT who also kindly supported the work, considers what the evidence has to say about effective ways of shifting people’s consumption patterns in more sustainable and healthy directions.

This article from Nature Climate Change discusses a research project that investigates the impacts of both traditional and transitioning Indian diets on the climate. Funded by Wellcome Trust, the goal is to obtain a detailed picture of what people are eating throughout India and calculate both the climate and health impacts of different types of diets. 

In this article in Science, researchers warn that imported fish sold in European and North American shops may be less sustainably caught than claims suggest. The experts argue that projects aimed at stimulating sustainable fishing in developing countries often don’t deliver on their goals and therefore, in order to prevent that the MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) quality label for sustainable fish is undermined,  requirements for market access need to be more rigorous.  

The share of the population that is overweight or obese is increasing, especially in the emerging economies of the developing world. This report explores policies to combat obesity.  Specifically, it analyses the effects of relative price changes between different types of foods on consumer behaviour in high-income and emerging economies (Brazil, China, Republic of Korea and Mexico). The researchers look into the causes of increasing obesity and changes to the retail prices of foods and ask if healthy eating is becoming a luxury in emerging markets, as has been the trend in high-income countries.

In this new paper researchers confirm that as carbon emissions continue to climb, so too has the Earth's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. About half of the emissions of CO2 each year remain in the atmosphere; the other half is taken up by the ecosystems on land and the oceans.

This study, which assesses the food supply available to more than 140 nations with populations greater than 1 million, shows that the globalization of trade is creating instability in the food distribution system.  As the world population increases, placing increasing pressure on use of limited land and water resources, food demand has grown and globalisation has made the food supply more sensitive to environmental and market fluctuations.

This paper finds that the introduction of legally binding agreements, signed by ranchers and slaughterhouses in Brazil, have been effective in halting deforestation.