The The Human Dynamics of Climate Change map has been created in a joint effort by scientists and policymakers and it shows how climate change could affect people all over the world by the end of the century if carbon emissions continue unabated.

In a debate between George Monbiot and L hunter Lovins in The Guardian, the issue of impacts and evidence of livestock grazing is discussed. Monbiots article “Eat more meat and save the world: the latest implausible farming miracle” can be found here while L. Hunter Lovins’ article “Why George Monbiot is wrong: grazing livestock can save the world” can be read here.

Despite being known for its large population of devout vegetarians, India is home to the world’s largest herd of cattle and is the world’s fourth largest exporter of beef, behind only the obvious behemoths, the US, Brazil and China.

In this book Ian Goldin brings together colleagues from the Oxford Martin School to discuss issues related to population growth. Each colleague contributes with a chapter on a range of issues such as population ethics, economics, demographic and environmental change, resource management, human health, and governance.

A recent issue of The Global Food Security (GFS) programme’s Insight series, which intends to provide a “balanced analysis of food related research for use by policy-makers and practitioners”, explores aquatic farming in the UK. 

The International Dairy Federation (IDF), the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the IFCN Dairy Research Network (IFCN) have collaborated on an extensive study on international dairy feeding systems to explore how differences within these systems for dairy cows, water buffaloes, sheep, and goats and between large and smallholders can affect a range of issues - from the nutritional content of the milk to the level of GHG emissions involved in the production process. Each of the three organizations had differing stakes in the research. 

This review, published in Nature Climate Change, concludes that the role of no-till agriculture in mitigating climate change may be over-stated . No-till and reduced tillage are methods of establishing crops with low soil disturbance as opposed to conventional tillage involving ploughing or other practices.

This paper published in PNAS - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America - looks at the environmental costs of food production and in particular livestock based food production.  The paper is based on annual 2000–2010 data for land, irrigation water, and fertilizer from the USDA, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Energy.

Food taxes & subsidies are effective at improving diets, according to a systematic review carried out by Australian researchers and published in the journal Nutrition Reviews. The systematic review analyses evidence from research published between January 2009 and March 2012 looking at the effectiveness of food taxes and subsidies on consumption. Included in the review were only papers assessing a specific food tax and those which directly and prospectively observed consumer responses to a fiscal policy intervention.