There is a strong scientific consensus that human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions exacerbate climate change. Governmental policies must aim to reduce GHG emissions, because climate change is a threat to environmental and human health. This document follows on PAN’s 2023 report, Pesticides and Climate Change: A Vicious Cycle. 3 A...

The Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project (HGP) started as a collaboration of Princeton University, Spelman College, and the Ujamaa Cooperative FarmingAlliance to collect oral histories of people who have worked to preserve Black and Indigenous seed and foodways through the Southeastern United States and Appalachia.  Working across six sites over two years...

Seeds and foods that are rooted in ancient traditions and practices can be a major contributor to people’s physical, mental and spiritual health. Women farmers in the North East of the United Kingdom are saving and exchanging traditional seeds, which is giving them a sense of abundance. In a garden at Montana University...

The article explores how agricultural technology (AgTech) can support agroecology by enhancing sustainable food systems while respecting ecological and social relationships. Drawing from a lecture by John Thackara at Tongji University, it highlights how digital tools, AI, and design innovations can complement traditional farming knowledge to improve resilience, biodiversity, and...

In his book, Formerly Known as Food, Kristin Lawless cautions readers about the risks of eating processed food produced by industrial farming. For example, maize and soybeans are widely used in animal feeds and edible oils. In the USA, corn and soy beans have been genetically modified to withstand massive applications...

Pollinators are essential to ecosystem health and food security, yet native bee populations face increasing threats from habitat loss, climate change, and land-use changes. This report explores how geospatial decision-making tools are being used across Canada, Mexico, and the United States to identify priority areas for native bee inventorying and...

Significance Local foods are critical to the food security and health of Indigenous peoples around the world, but the importance—both monetary and environmental—of local “informal” economies is often not visible to policymakers. Here, we combine data from multiple sources and use Bayesian inference techniques to estimate the carbon emissions that would...

Cover crops (CCs) offer ecosystem benefits, yet their impact on subsequent crop yields varies with climate, soil, and management practices. Using the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Eastern Nebraska Research, Education, and Extension Center (ENREEC), we identified optimal cereal rye management strategies focusing...

The effects of climate change on agriculture and food production are evident in regions around the world. Effective climate change adaptation and mitigation in the agricultural sector calls for multiple context specific, and at times complex, strategies. Promoting these strategies effectively involves changing the behavior, strategies and agricultural practices of...

Climate change significantly contributes to shifts in the geographical range of pests and diseases. Leafhoppers (Hemiptera: Cicadellidae), known vectors of phytoplasmas pathogens, are linked to the transmission of more than 600 diseases affecting a thousand plant species worldwide. Despite this, the potential effects of climate change on leafhopper vectors of...

Climate change used to be something fishers in Alaska talked of as a concern for the future. No longer. That future is now. Alaska has witnessed, almost overnight, collapses in both fish and crab stocks. The cod of the Gulf of Alaska; the Bering Sea king crab and snow crab;...

Degraded soil can be repaired, and replenished with nutrients, until it produces abundant harvests at lower costs, while removing carbon from the atmosphere, and putting it back into the ground. This is the optimistic message of David Montgomery’s book, Growing a Revolution.

Permit banks and collective ownership in Alaska return individual fishing rights to the collective, harking back to the early days of fishing. More than 12,000 years ago, people on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off British Columbia about 48 km south of Alaska, were cooking salmon. They are the earliest known humans...

This paper discusses the numerous ways that Indigenous peoples are excluded from or disadvantaged in public procurement markets, as well as international best practices regarding their inclusion in these markets. Five countries were identified as having relevant programs and initiatives to incorporate Indigenous peoples in the public procurement market: Australia,...

The International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF) has just published the latest issue of SAMUDRA Report, its triannual journal on fisheries, communities and livelehoods. The current edition, SAMUDRA Report No. 91, dated June 2024, is a Special Issue that runs into 110 pages and features a diverse range of...

Podcast:Is it possible to decarbonize agriculture and make the food system more resilient to climate change? Today, I’m speaking with agricultural policy expert Peter Lehner about his climate neutral agriculture ideas and the science, law and policy needed to achieve these ambitious goals. Lehner is an environmental lawyer at Earthjustice...

This paper examines three types of locally oriented Short Food Supply Chains in southern New England and their spatial alignment with a variety of demographic factors. We find that pay-as-you-go operations are particularly likely in predominantly White areas, and to some extent in higher income areas, but box share arrangements...

This paper builds on prior critical scholarship on Agriculture 4.0—an umbrella term to reference the utilization of robot-ics and automation, AI, remote sensing, big data, and the like in agriculture—especially the literature focusing on issues relating to equity and social sustainability. Critical agrifood scholarship has spent considerable energy interrogating who gets what, how...

To mitigate climate change, some seek to store carbon from the atmosphere in agricultural soils. However, our understanding about how agriculture affects soil organic carbon is muddied by studies lacking longitudinal data, ignoring bulk density changes, or sampling only surface soils. To better understand soil organic carbon trends, here we...

Agroforestry is receiving renewed interest due to its highly diversified, multifunctional nature. With a long history and roots in many indigenous farming systems, agroforestry offers a ‘win-win’ for biodiversity, carbon sequestration, on-farm profitability, resilience, and social wellbeing. However, the re-integration of trees on farms goes against the previous decades’ push...