This book tells the story of the rainforests that once covered parts of Britain, with only small fragments now remaining. Author Guy Shrubsole explores why this ecosystem is little known by the public and even by environmentalists, and asks what can be done to bring it back.

This book brings together a range of issues in the field of urban food governance, covering the history of the field, its frames, theories and concepts, practices in case studies including the United States, Brazil and Tanzania, different scales and actors, and envisaged futures for urban food governance.

This primer from the Transnational Institute describes the diversity of pastoralist systems that are found around the world. Among other topics, it explains the similarities and differences between pastoralists and peasants; explores the ways in which pastoralists have inaccurately been blamed for desertification; argues that anti-livestock narratives should not conflate pastoralism and industrial livestock farming; and asks to what extent animal-sourced foods are important for nutrition.

The WWF sets out global trends in biodiversity over the past 50 years, concluding that land use change is currently the greatest threat to nature, but that climate change could overtake land use change in impact if we cannot keep warming to 1.5°C. The relative abundance of monitored vertebrate wildlife populations has declined by an average of 69% between 1970 and 2018, with particularly large declines (of 94%) in Latin America and the Caribbean. (For a definition of relative abundance, see page 9 of the Living Planet Index technical report). The report also emphasises the importance of indigenous knowledge and a rights-based approach to solving the nature, climate and pollution crises.

Inclusion of smallholders in modern (i.e. formal and globalised) food supply chains may not bring the benefits that it was expected to, according to this working paper from the International Institute for Environment and Development. Based on a literature review and stakeholder interviews, it concludes that smallholders’ access to higher-value markets probably results in only small income gains with most benefits going to the farmers who were wealthier to start with; that farmer cooperatives can be exclusionary; that despite high awareness of gender issues, there has been little progress on outcomes; and that it is difficult to quantify progress on the outcomes of environmental sustainability standards.

This report by the Canadian NGO the ETC Group profiles the world’s largest corporations in each of 11 agrifood sectors, including seeds, fertilisers, livestock genetics and food delivery. It shows that most of these sectors are dominated by just four to six large companies and argues that this “top heavy” structure threatens food sovereignty and gives large corporations outsize influence over markets, research and policy.

This report from UK-based think tank Chatham House assesses global policies on climate, biodiversity and food. It argues that current plans to protect the climate and nature up to 2030 are not ambitious enough, and that only a transformation of the global food system can meet goals on biodiversity and climate mitigation. It argues that immediate priority should be given to both reducing farm-level impacts of livestock rearing and reducing overall production of animal-sourced foods, thus freeing up land to restore nature and sequester carbon, particularly in higher income countries.

This paper models the extent to which intensification of soybean and maize production in Brazil could help to reduce agricultural expansion and protect ecosystems including the Amazon rainforest.

This paper estimates the global and regional prevalence of certain micronutrient deficiencies in two population groups that are particularly vulnerable to such deficiencies. By analysing 24 datasets, it estimates that, globally, around 56% of preschool-aged children are deficient in at least one of iron, zinc and vitamin A, and that 69% of non-pregnant women of reproductive age are deficient in at least one of iron, zinc and folate.