This progress report from the UK’s Committee on Climate Change assesses progress in reducing UK greenhouse gas emissions over the past year and makes recommendations on how to ensure the post-COVID-19 recovery is green and resilient. It includes discussions of agriculture, diets and land-use change.

This modelling study, co-authored by FCRN member Luke Spajic, analyses both the health and environmental outcomes of national dietary guidelines from 85 countries, then compares these outcomes to global health and environmental targets, as well as the outcomes of the diets recommended by the World Health Organisation and the EAT-Lancet Commission. The vast majority of guidelines - 83 in total, or 98% - were found to be incompatible with at least one health or environmental target.

This paper by FCRN member Eric Toensmeier argues that perennial vegetables (those grown on plants that live for more than two years) are underappreciated as a source of nutrients, as a means of sequestering carbon and as beneficial to biodiversity.

In this paper, FCRN member Michael MacLeod reports that global aquaculture produced around 0.49% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2017 - a similar quantity to the emissions from sheep meat production. When emissions are measured per kg of edible product, the paper finds aquaculture to have low emissions intensity relative to meat from goats, cattle, buffalo and sheep and similar emissions intensity to meat from pigs and chickens.

This book offers an accessible introduction to the field of environmental justice, including chapters on food, agriculture and environmental justice, biodiversity, water, decolonisation, racism and gender.

This book looks at how fungi can be used in sustainable agriculture, for example as a fertiliser, for management of drought and as a growth promoter.

UK NGO the Food Foundation has published its Plating up Progress 2020 analysis of the progress being made by major UK-operating businesses within the food retail, foodservice and restaurant chain sectors across key themes relating to the transition to a healthy and sustainable food system.

FCRN member Allison Gacad has written this article on how epigenetic modification of plants could enhance food security by enabling crops to activate or deactivate certain genes depending on environmental conditions.

This report from the European Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics notes that a no-deal Brexit could lead to an increase in the amount of meat imported to the UK from outside the European Union, in part because of possible tariff cuts and in part because food standards may change. The report finds that antibiotic use per tonne of livestock unit is five times higher in the US than in the UK and also higher than antibiotic use in most European countries.