2011 updates on food and farming policy

Winter 2011

Food and climate change
Sustain's policy director Kath Dalmeny continues to sit on the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN) advisory board. She has recently been working on plans for a two-day workshop hosted at the University of Oxford in January 2012. The aim is to investigate the issues surrounding sustainable intensification. Kath will act as a facilitator for the 25 participants from academia, government, international bodies and non-governmental organisations.

Planetary Boundaries and the Rio Earth Summit
The WWF has recently been supporting legal approaches to governance of natural resources to keep within the limits of those identified as critical to maintaining a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity and other life to thrive. These have been collectively described in a recent Nature journal article as the ‘nine planetary boundaries’, and include climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, nitrogen and phosphate, global fresh water use, change in land use, biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution. Most of these ‘nine planetary boundaries’ relate directly or indirectly to food production, hence Sustain’s interest.

We have participated in an event hosted by one of the authors of the original Nature article, and also in several planning meetings with a group of sustainability governance experts, convened by WWF. A draft Planetary Boundaries Declaration has been presented to a wide range of country representatives for the Rio +20 Earth Summit in New York, and also received considerable interest from a wide range of policy groups associated with preparations for Rio. We are helping with funding bids to take this work to the next stage.