FCRN member Dr. Adrian Muller co-authored a meta-analysis published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The authors looked at datasets from 74 studies from pairwise comparisons of organic vs. nonorganic farming systems to identify differences in soil organic carbon (SOC). 

The UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) recently released a statement saying that by the end of 2015 all palm oil used in central Government food and catering services will come from environmentally friendly sources. However, Defra’s statement has come under fire from groups such as WWF-UK and the British Retail Consortium (BRC), who say the agreement is too weak and requires participation by other sectors to have a substantial impact.

In One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed The World?, Gordon Conway explains the many interrelated issues critical to our global food supply from the science of agricultural advances to the politics of food security. He emphasises the essential combination of increased food production, environmental stability, and poverty reduction necessary to end endemic hunger on our planet.

A paper in Nature Climate Change finds that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising temperatures cause rice agriculture to release more of the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4) for each kilogram of rice it produces.

Dr. Jasper Knight, Wits University (South Africa), and Dr. Stephan Harrison, University of Exeter (UK) argue that governments and institutions should focus on developing adaptation policies to address and mitigate the impact of global warming, rather than putting emphasis on carbon cap-and-trade schemes. Their arguments are presented in a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change entitled “The impact of climate change on terrestrial Earth surface systems.”

In August 2012, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), responding to a request from the United Nations’ Committee on Food Security, asked experts from CGIAR’s 15 research centers to summarize the effects of climate change on 22 of the most important agricultural commodities and 3 critical natural resources in the developing world.

We recently asked for more information on fishing and aquaculture and the following was passed along to us. These are now up in the Research Library.

In our 24th September Newsletter, we mentioned that the EU is considering plans to limit crop-based biofuels to 5% of transport fuel. Biofuels have been promoted in recent years, largely because of the belief that they will help reduce transport’s impact on the environment, and particularly because of its contribution to climate change. But the indirect effects of growing crops to make fuel have seriously challenged these assumptions.