On 11 November 2009, Compassion in World Farming and Friends of the Earth jointly published a report entitled: Eating the planet? How we can feed the world without trashing it. The report is based on research commissioned by the two organisations, undertaken by the Institute of Social Ecology in Austria and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, which led to the production of a much longer study entitled Eating the Planet: Feeding and fuelling the world sustainably, fairly and humanely– a scoping study.

This Brook Lyndhurst report, commissioned by Defra, looks at the notion of 'green' mavens, with a view to identifying specific opportunities for communications and policy. In mainstream commercial marketing, the concept of a 'maven' is increasingly well established. A maven is an individual with two key attributes: they have specialist or detailed knowledge about consumer products; and they are perceived as a trusted and reliable source of information by other individuals in their social network.