Blog for People, Food and Nature

As discussed on the blog yesterday, policy is a critical piece of the climate-smart landscape puzzle. Often, to motivate the shifts toward farm practices and landscape features that both mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and increase the resilience of agricultural systems, policies must be in place that align these goals. The State of California recently made […] ...

Making agriculture more resilient to climate change and contributing to mitigation efforts requires some specific elements are present within a landscape, as we outlined on the Blog last Tuesday. Incorporating climate-smart agricultural practices, a diversity of land uses across a landscape, and the management of interactions between those land uses is critical to achieving ada ...

Climate change is the one challenge facing every single member of the world’s population. The world’s major opportunity to organize and mobilize our response to this threat, the 18th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP18), begins at the end of this month in Doha, Qatar. Held […] ...

Smallholder farmers in East Africa have begun shifting practices and use of technology towards those that are more climate-resilient, according to a recent survey published in the journal Food Security. While encouraging, these are also baby steps, and some of the most transformative changes have yet to catch on. Led by researchers at the Climate […] ...

One of the critical questions facing the agricultural development community today, is how can agricultural systems continue to produce adequate food for the human population, while reducing harmful impacts on the environment and confronting climate change. Examining one proposed solution – “sustainable intensification” – the Food Climate Research Network ...

How do we know the extent of impact agriculture has on the environment, or the effects of shifting practices and technology on agriculture? This is an especially important question when there are certain standards to be met, and there are many, as we have discussed previously on the blog. With the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil […] ...

Partnerships – a primary theme and prevailing topic of discussion during the second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development – were touted as essential elements to link research to development outcomes. Not business-as-usual development outcomes: GCARD2 attendees recognized that in the face of this century’s human and environmental challenges, a paradigm ...

On the heels of the Committee on World Food Security’s 39th meeting, food security experts (and many others) will head to the second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD), held in Uruguay, this week. Building off of the first conference in 2010, this year’s meeting will focus on implementation, planning joint actions, and stakeholder [& ...

The annual meeting of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil begins next Monday. Hosted in Singapore, the meeting will celebrate RSPO’s tenth anniversary of working towards sustainable business models. It will provide a platform for the various stakeholders in the industry to reflect on advancements and lessons of the past decade, and to express views on […] ...

Yesterday marked the second annual Food Day in the United States.  Not to be confused with the international observance of World Food Day that celebrated agricultural cooperatives last Tuesday, the U.S. day specifically focuses on domestic food movements and policies. Created by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), and with a diverse array of advisory [&hel ...