In this open letter a large number of civil society organisations present a critique of the use of ‘Climate Smart Agriculture’, a concept that is gaining increasing attention among governments, NGOs, academics, corporations and in international policy. They state that they have concerns around the aims of the 'Global Alliance on Climate Smart Agriculture' to establish policies to enable farming to deal with the impacts of climate change.

In this blog-post for the The Institute of Food Safety, Integrity & Protection (TiFSiP) Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at the City University London and FCRN advisory board member, discusses sustainable diets. He argues that the pursuit of food integrity and authenticity is also the pursuit of sustainability.

Balancing on a Planet argues that while the current Anthropocene epoch presents unique challenges to our food system, including climate change, that threaten our survival, most solutions continue to follow the Neolithic strategy that has been dominant since the beginning of agriculture some 13,000 years ago.

This new study finds that GHG emissions from growing crops and raising livestock are now higher than from deforestation and land use change. It combines three global datasets of greenhouse gas emissions for the 'Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses' (AFOLU) sector. It includes emissions from different sectors and human activities such as deforestation, clearing and burning biomass, and from raising and feeding livestock.

McDonalds has announced that it will begin using “verified sustainable beef” in some of its hamburgers by 2016. In this article however, it is questioned “what exactly is so sustainable – or indeed verifiable – about the beef of the future”.

FAO has launched a new online platform, which provides access to resources on developing sustainable food value chains (SFVC). The goal is for SFVC development to provide a flexible framework to improve food systems, reducing poverty and hunger in a sustainable manner.  FAO’s platform will include:

In his article in The Economist, it is argued that China’s insatiable appetite for pork is not only a symbol of the country’s rise, but also a danger to the world from a sustainability perspective. The article discusses the history of pork consumption in China, its cultural and economic importance as well as how it impacts land use and large scale land acquisitions abroad.

The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has published a report based on their newly developed Global Calculator tool.

This article from Nasdaq describes what they call a “shocking” reduction in meat consumption and how this may impact the meat industry and other sectors. The potential catalyst they argue is the release of preliminary recommendations from the committee of medical and nutrition experts involved in developing USDA dietary guidelines.