A Common Food Policy for the EU

The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) are working to reform the food systems in the EU. They contend that a transformation of the current Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) towards a ‘Common Food Policy’ is necessary. Widening the focus from agriculture to food policy has the potential to benefit the environment, public health, […]


Organic agriculture – should science or ideology guide our decisions?

The Plant Science Panel Q&A entitled ‘What does natural actually mean’ over on Sense About Science is well worth a read. In particular I direct your attention to Question 3 regarding organic agriculture. There are a variety of movements, production systems, practices, and disciplines being promoted as sustainable alternatives to the, broadly speaking, industrial agriculture we […]


Prof Kevin Anderson Interview

The following interview with Prof Kevin Anderson (Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research) by John Gibbons (ThinkOrSwim) is well worth watching. Visit the ThinkOrSwim blog to see the full post here. At just under an hour the discussion provides a good insight into Ireland’s response to climate change, the Paris Agreement […]


Only five years left before 1.5C carbon budget is blown

The following article from the Carbon Brief explains an updated analysis for 2016 that calculates how many years of current emissions are left before blowing the budgets for 1.5C, 2C or 3C above pre-industrial levels. i.e. how much carbon dioxide we can emit and still keep global average temperature rise to no more than 1.5C, 2C […]


Sustainable Intensification and Efficiency – how values reflect strategies for sustainable food

In a previous post I described sustainable diets, a consumption-side solution to the sustainable food system problem, and mentioned other solutions namely; reducing food losses and waste and improving governance. So far one particular mindset has dominated sustainable agricultural policy, the ‘sustainable intensification’ of food production. There are many concerns about the dominance of this mindset; whether […]


Sustainable diets

One of the emerging strategies for tackling the environmental cost of our food system, and the associated health problems of unhealthy eating, is the idea of shifting diets in a sustainable direction. The food system problem, referred to by Tilman & Clark (2015) as the “diet-environment-health trilemma” can be summed up as follows; producing food […]


Media

  ‘No Snowflake’ is an investigation into Ireland’s policies on agriculture and climate change, and asks “who is really responsible for the burden we have to bear?” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report: