As many welcome the novel spotlight on food systems at COP28, the UN Climate Change Conference taking place in the United Arab Emirates this month, authors Cleo Verkuijl and Jeff Sebo call for a renewed focus on animal welfare and the ethical price being paid for a narrow and inattentive focus on emissions reduction. About the authors: Cleo Verkuijl is a scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute US and a visiting research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Programme. She has served as a coordinating lead author of three UN climate policy assessments. Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. His most recent book is Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves.

Food systems actors are increasingly turning to stakeholder participation to ‘co-produce’ solutions to challenges. At a workshop on participatory research, blog authors Soujanya Mantravadi and Hannah Gardiner noticed differences in understanding of participatory concepts between their two disciplines - industrial information systems and food justice in communities, respectively. In this blog they consider the implications of those differences for community-industry collaboration and highlight some key practices for working across disciplines.Bramble H Gardiner (they/them) is a community activist and PhD researcher in food justice/systems and social science at the University of Plymouth. Soujanya Mantravadi (she/her) is an engineer and postdoc in industrial systems and supply chains at the University of Cambridge.

The following interview was originally recorded in October 2021 between podcast co-host Samara Brock and the Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, Shalmali Guttal. It has been edited for clarity and length.Focus on the Global South (Focus) is an Asian activist, policy research think tank that works with social movements, civil societies, government officials and the public on various aspects of globalization, economic financial policies, and environmental ecological issues. Focus brings diverse actors together to share and deepen the analysis of emerging power patterns and power relations, and to build broad collective mobilizations for global change. It produces analyses that illuminate relations of power, how they create and perpetuate inequality, exclusion, environmental destruction, and entrench marginalization at national, regional and international levels. It also aims to generate high quality, credible and accessible materials that contextualize, inform and support people’s struggles.