In November 2008 the Greater London Authority published a report on London's food related greenhouse gas emissions.

This short article discusses policies for achieving food security and environmental objectives in China. Rural development has been placed at the top of the policy agenda in China but recently the Chinese leadership has also included an ambition to achieve environmental sustainability. This is presented as part of the plans for an “ecological civilization”, presented at the 18th Plenary Congress of the Communist Party of China.

The Climate Group has produced a new briefing about China’s 13th Five Year Plan. The plan, to be released in March 2016, provides a blueprint that will guide the country’s economic and political progress between 2016 and 2020.  Its targets and policies, will have global implications, as China moves to become the world’s largest economy.

Sustainable intensification is receiving growing attention as a way to address the challenge of feeding an increasingly populous and resource-constrained world. But are we asking too much of it? Nearly 20 years after the concept was developed, this briefing revisits the term and asks what sustainable intensification is — a useful guiding framework for raising agricultural productivity on existing arable land in a sustainable manner; and what it is not -a paradigm for achieving food security overall.

This paper focuses on the governance of food supplies and specifically discusses the increasing policy focus on engaging food industry in the international pursuit of sustainability. The researchers also look at policy actions aimed at achieving sustainable consumption and production of food.

Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) reports that the Australian beef industry has reduced its environmental footprint over the past 30 years. The results are presented in a new paper in Agricultural Systems, and in a press-release MLA writes that:

In a new video published by the Royal Society in their 'Science stories' series (which charts 350 years of scientific publishing at the Royal Society) Dr Paul Williams, a meteorologist in NERC's National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, considers why it is that scientific questions so often turn into full-blown and acrimonious controversies.

This paper discusses urban farmers’ markets in relation to food accessibility, the type and variety of foods they offer and their price and quality. This US based study is the first to itemize farmers’ market products in an entire urban county—in this case the Bronx—and compare them with what is available in nearby stores. It finds that farmers’ markets located in urban areas may not contribute positively to nutrition or health.

This paper argues that high-performance computing and genetic engineering that boost the photosynthetic efficiency of plants offers the best hope of increasing crop yields enough to feed a growing world population by 2050. It points out that we now have unprecedented computational resources that allow us to model every stage of photosynthesis and we can thus determine where the bottlenecks are. Advances in genetic engineering enable us to augment or circumvent steps that impede efficiency.