A new a two-year interdisciplinary project research project, Rurban Revolution, will ask whether ruralising urban areas through greening and growing can create a healthy, sustainable and resilient food system. The project, based at Lancaster University, will be run by Jess Davies. Thanks to FCRN member Lael Walsh for bringing this project to our attention.

This special issue of the newsletter Forest Cover, produced by the Global Forest Coalition, focuses on large-scale cattle farming and its interactions both with other food production systems and with forests.

This report from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and international humanitarian agency CARE provides advice, tools and successful examples on integrating gender equality and women’s empowerment into programmes on climate-smart agriculture.

This briefing paper from the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London examines what the food system is, how it can be defined, and why those definitions matter to the development of food policy.

This systematic review of taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) finds that the taxes are associated with a decrease in the amount of sugar-sweetened beverages that are bought and consumed. A 10% tax lead to a 10% decrease in purchase and intake levels, on average, although there was considerable variation between results in different locations.

This paper sets out a new method to account for nutrition in the functional unit of life cycle assessments of single foods. The method accounts for the wider dietary context of each food type, which is found to affect the results relative to using either mass as a functional unit, or another nutrient-based functional unit that does not consider the dietary context.

This report from the US-based Breakthrough Institute suggests that increasing the productivity of grazing systems, particularly in lower-income countries, can help to shrink the area of land used as pasture.

This report from the UK’s Triodos Bank calls for a radical overhaul of the food system with a focus on environmental sustainability, healthy diets, and fair pay for farmers.

According to this paper, households in the Netherlands wasted 41kg of solid food per person in 2016 - a 15% decline since 2010. Furthermore, 57 litres per person of potable liquids such as coffee, tea and milk are disposed of via the sink or toilet each year. Rice, bread, pasta, vegetables and pastries are among the food types most likely to be wasted (as a percentage of purchased quantity).