This paper points out that the potential for producing bioenergy from crops depends on a great many factors including assumptions about gains in agricultural productivity, patterns of food demand, political stability, policies on biodiversity and so forth.

This is a useful and readable opinion piece highlighting some fundamental errors in thinking about biofuels.

The Global Partnership on Nutrient Management (GPNM) and the International Nitrogen Initiative (INI) have published a ‘key messages’ statement for Rio+20. The document highlights the problems caused by excessive nutrient use on the one hand, and insufficient use on the other, and identifies nine key actions as being central to improving nutrient use efficiency, thereby improving food and energy production while reducing N and P losses that pollute our environment. 

This is a very interesting paper that reviews the literature on the relationship between consumption and GHG  emissions, between population and emissions, and the interactions among all three. It raises doubts that improvements in technology, or shifts in patterns of behaviour (consumption) will be sufficient in addressing GHG emissions unless combined with a greater focus on population growth (scale effects). 

The Global Network of Science Academies (IAP) comprising the world’s 105 science academies, have issued a statement highlighting the relevance of population and consumption to the future of both developed and developing countries and reminds policy-makers preparing for Rio+20 of the need to consider a number of issues.

The Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation (PCF) has announced initial funding of £200,000 for a pioneering new project to help British farmers improve their productivity in an environmentally responsible way. The Duchy Originals Future Farming Programme will be delivered by the Soil Association, in partnership with Duchy Originals from Waitrose, The Prince of Wales’s organic food business.

This paper, co written by FCRN mailing list member Kurt Schmidinger argues that the ‘missed potential carbon sink’ - - the carbon sequestering opportunity cost of using land for livestock (and presumably for other agricultural commodities as well as for other activities) needs to be taken into account in calculating the CO2eq emissions arising from any activity. 

In 2009, Rockström et al published a paper in Nature which proposed the concept of nine planetary boundaries, which we must keep within if we are not to suffer potentially catastrophic consequences. More recently Nature has published an interesting opinion piece on the boundaries idea.