The online magazine The Local in Denmark reports that The Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries in Denmark has launched a new strategy to double organic farming and serve more organic food in national public institutions. The government has set a goal of doubling the amount of organic farming by 2020 compared to 2007. The nation’s public institutions serve some 800,000 meals every single day.

Global environmental change (GEC) represents an immediate and unprecedented threat to the food security of hundreds of millions of people, especially those who depend on small-scale agriculture for their livelihoods. At the same time, agriculture and related activities also contribute to climate change, by intensifying greenhouse gas emissions and altering the land surface.

A set of papers from the First International Conference on Global Food Security is now available online. The conference attracted 600 participants from 65 countries. All of the papers in the special issue are open access for the first year and available here.

Two reports this week by the US National Research Council look at whether humans could artificially steer Earth's climate by reflecting sunlight back into space, or by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The twin reports– Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration and Climate Intervention: Reflecting Sunlight to Cool the Earth argue that carbon dioxide removal might have a place in a broader response plan, but sunlight-reflecting technologies are too risky.

As much as 75 percent of global seed diversity in staple food crops is held and actively used by a wide range of small farmholders - workers of less than three to seven acres - with the rest in gene banks.

Video recordings of the talks from the City Food Symposium of December 2014, hosted by City University London, are now available online. You will find downloadable files of the speakers’ presentations on the City University London website.

The 2015 USDA’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, has published a report that sets out its revised dietary recommendations to encourage Americans to eat more healthily, and this time the recommendations also take account of environmental sustainability considerations. The report, Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (Advisory Report) will be reviewed by the Secretaries of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Federal government will determine how it will use the information in the Advisory Report as the government develops the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2015 to be released later this year.

A new paper produced by a global group of agrosystem modellers, argues that if no action is taken to adapt, the future global wheat harvest is likely to be reduced by 6 % per each degree Celsius of local temperature increase. This would correspond to 42 million tonnes of yield reduction worldwide, which equals a quarter of current global wheat trade.

This report sets out new climate change projections for Australia. It was produced by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and funded by the Australian Government Department of the Environment, CSIRO and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The key findings from the report are copied as follows: