Food & Agriculture Stories
How do we feed a growing and more affluent population without the environmental collateral damage? The Anthropocene’s coverage of food and agriculture digs deep into innovations in farming, aquaculture, filling the global protein gap, reducing the carbon footprint of supply chains, and more.
57,000 commonly consumed foods, ranked by environmental impact
Researchers build an algorithm to sift through thousands of multi-ingredient foods and decipher the footprint of each one—which could help provide sustainability guidance where it’s been sorely lacking before.
An ingenious system of farming on floating hyacinth mats offers climate resilience
Researchers working in Bangladesh show how this ancient form of food production increases farmers’ incomes and food security
In a first, researchers connect the dots between EVs, global wildlands, and emissions avoided
Under a full electrification scenario in the US, 4.4 million hectares of land could be saved (mostly in Brazil, China and India), and the CO2 emissions of all gas cars in the US could be halved.
A 15-year snapshot of US diets reveals a gradual shift away from beef
US citizens are eating less animal-based products—and that's driven a 35% decrease in dietary carbon emissions over 15 years.
What would happen if just 54 wealthy nations adopted the EAT-Lancet planetary health diet?
Answer: it could lock away enough carbon to help them meet their emissions targets by century-end.
Making clothes from trees brings an unlikely win-win for food security and the environment
New breeds of poplar trees could produce enough fiber to replace a large share of cotton farming in Europe — freeing up that land for other uses.
A drastic revolution in the way we eat and farm could limit habitat lost to agriculture to a mere 1%
Alternatively, researchers found, if we don’t change our food systems, habitat losses will affect tens of thousands of species by 2050
Researchers tackle food waste and food taste in a single blow
Their new discovery not only keeps damage-prone fruit out of the landfills, it also requires less energy-guzzling infrastructure for storage and cooling
What if the world phased out meat consumption over 15 years? The numbers are stunning—and instructive.
Such a bold transition would cut anthropogenic emissions by 68% by century-end, and get us more than halfway to achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.
What are the world’s 35 biggest meat and dairy companies doing to mitigate climate change?
Drawing on a vast dataset called OpenSecrets, researchers found that the amount that companies spent on lobbying against climate action
generally tracked with the intensity of their emissions
