ecologically sustainable food systems

This paper by Nature.com assesses the role of trees on agricultural land and their significance for carbon sequestration at a global level, along with recent change trends. Agroforestry systems and tree cover on agricultural land make an important contribution to climate change mitigation, but are not systematically accounted for in either global carbon budgets or national carbon accounting. Remote sensing data show that in 2010, 43% of all agricultural land globally had at least 10% tree cover and that this has increased by 2% over the previous ten years. »

This report addresses various recommendations to deal with the current El Nino and the forecast of La Nina. According to Oxfam, El Nino was a broadly preventable crisis and the severity of El Nino’s impacts is a reflection of the world’s failure to provide comprehensive and long-term strategies to anticipate, prepare and adapt. To end this cycle of failure, there is an urgent need for humanitarian action where the situation is already dire, to prepare for La Niña later this year, to commit to comprehensive new measures to build communities’ resilience, and to mobilize global action to address climate change. »

This booklet by CGIAR is compendium of best practices that brings together practical ecologically sound and nutrition-sensitive approaches to improving the productivity of backyard, community and family farms. With the increasing awareness of the importance of safe and healthy diets, there is a resurgence of interest in these complementary pathways to household level food security. »

This article is addressing an action oriented research agenda towards the challenges that climate-change brings. The authors see a strong research-implementation gap, as the growing number of climate impact studies on crop yields, provides marginal increases in knowledge. Therefore, the authors call for the scientific agenda to turn its attention to practical options in the face of climate change. According to the authors, the new agenda will face four key challenges. »

This report by IPES-Food is about the changes that the agricultural sector should make to move towards a diversified agroecological system. This should stop the negative climate effects of the current industrial agriculture system. Input-intensive crop monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots are now dominate farming landscapes. The uniformity at the heart of these systems leads systematically to negative outcomes and vulnerabilities. »

In this article in Solutions it is argued that with limited global resources, and in the face of environmental changes, meeting future food security challenges will first require a shift in thinking from just ‘producing food’ (and other sectoral interests) to ‘food systems.’ Future solutions should aim to find synergies between climate mitigation and adaptation and between health and environmental goals, with inevitable trade-offs that will need careful management. »