Much of last week’s report from the IPCC– and the corresponding media headlines – talked about the truly apocalyptic consequences of not taking action on climate. The report spelled out just how bad things are already, but also used specially developed future scenarios (the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways,
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The debate about farming and climate change has been more than a little contentious. When an issue is this complex, it can become dominated by sound bites: cows are bad, sheep destroy the landscape, and we should put most of Scotland to trees to save the planet.
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Since we started ploughing we’ve moved over 130 billion tonnes of soil carbon into the atmosphere as CO2. That’s a lot less than fossil fuels, but it’s still equivalent to about half the excess carbon now in the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial levels. So getting some of
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The UK Government is planning to reduce regulation around gene-edited livestock and crops in England, arguing that this technology is essentially no different from natural breeding and should not be regulated the same way as older methods of genetic modification. While this does not immediately affect the
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The return of the Westminster Agriculture Bill to the Commons in the next few days is a pivotal moment – for Brexit, for Scotland and in many ways for democracy. The latest Which? Poll out today shows 94% of people want to maintain high food standards and 77%
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It’s natural to put ‘food’ into the search box and see what this 135 page document says. But that would miss some of the most important messages. First, of course, the incorporation into Scots law of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This has
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Cereal production in Scotland is dominated by a small number of conventionally bred varieties of barley, wheat and oats. These have low genetic diversity and tend to require a large amount of chemical input to achieve high yields. Most of the grain produced from these varieties is
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The UK Government is currently consulting through a White Paper on how the UK internal market should operate after Brexit. Like much of the conversation about Brexit, it’s a political tussle pretending to be about economics. Devolution gives the Scottish Parliament and Government powers to legislate on
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The boss of Unilever wrote the foreword, and yet some sections of yesterday’s World Economic Forum report on ‘The Future of Nature and Business’ could have been written by Nourish: “COVID-19 is a stark reminder of how ignoring biophysical risks can have catastrophic health and economic impacts
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This blog post was originally a talk given by Keesje Avis at a webinar entitled “Scotland’s Response to the Climate Emergency” hosted by FoES and partners. See all the presentations here. When talking and thinking about climate change mitigation, we tend to talk about numbers and in
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