Food in a Planetary Emergency


Book Description

This book Food in a Planetary Emergency is a timely overview of the current food systems and the required transformations to respond to the challenges of climate change, population pressures, biodiversity loss and use of natural resources, such as soils, water and phosphorus. This book takes a planetary health perspective which explores the links between natural systems and human wellbeing implying that there is need for united actions to achieve important environmental and population health co-benefits. This book outlines that the foundation of planetary health is sustainability. It addresses environment and climate change emergency as a global agenda, however, emphasises the urgency of the sustainability perspective which integrates a wide spectrum of issues that require integrated solutions to offer better prospects for humanity. This book drives this argument further through the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) where food is not just SDG2 but transcends all 17 goals. This book tackles the problems of food production and consumption at a global, industry and individual level linking it to topics related to the natural environment, climate change, waste, marketing, new ways of producing food and providing alternative proteins, mitigating non-communicable diseases, flexitarianism and the role of Generation Z in the emerging dietary choices. This book benefits readers with understanding the importance and intricacy of their dietary choices at a point in time when our planet is facing an emergency triggered by long-term dependence on fossil fuels and artificial fertilisers but also by the ways we have provided food. However, this book also delivers the message that safeguarding and sustaining planetary health is possible.




Planetary Health


Book Description

Human health depends on the health of the planet. Earth’s natural systems—the air, the water, the biodiversity, the climate—are our life support systems. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, scarcity of land and freshwater, pollution and other threats are degrading these systems. The emerging field of planetary health aims to understand how these changes threaten our health and how to protect ourselves and the rest of the biosphere. Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves provides a readable introduction to this new paradigm. With an interdisciplinary approach, the book addresses a wide range of health impacts felt in the Anthropocene, including food and nutrition, infectious disease, non-communicable disease, dislocation and conflict, and mental health. It also presents strategies to combat environmental changes and its ill-effects, such as controlling toxic exposures, investing in clean energy, improving urban design, and more. Chapters are authored by widely recognized experts. The result is a comprehensive and optimistic overview of a growing field that is being adopted by researchers and universities around the world. Students of public health will gain a solid grounding in the new challenges their profession must confront, while those in the environmental sciences, agriculture, the design professions, and other fields will become familiar with the human consequences of planetary changes. Understanding how our changing environment affects our health is increasingly critical to a variety of disciplines and professions. Planetary Health is the definitive guide to this vital field.




The Planetary Emergency


Book Description

Earth and its inhabitants face an unprecedented crisis--the human-caused destruction of the planet's life support systems. Deteriorating climate bringing super storms, mass forest fires, melting glaciers, droughts, extreme heat and rising seas, a decline in food production, soil loss, water pollution and declining fisheries all threaten the future of life on earth with a looming extinction event not seen for 60 million years. Beginning in the 17th century, we developed a civilization based on radical materialism, exploitation of natural resources and the myth of endless economic growth. For all its technological wonders, this "hypercivilization" has proven unsustainable. This book explores ways we can create an "ecocivilization" compatible with the laws and limits of nature--a new way of living already developing, with new technologies, new forms of social organization and a new story about ourselves and the Earth.




The Coming Famine


Book Description

Lays out a picture of impending planetary crisis - a global food shortage that threatens to hit by mid-century - that would dwarf any in our previous experience. This book describes a dangerous confluence of shortages - of water, land, energy, technology, and knowledge - combined with the increased demand created by population and economic growth




Diet for a Hot Planet


Book Description

Discusses the effects of transporting food on the climate, how the food industry is becoming aware of its part in global warming, the emerging solutions from farmers, and the seven principles for a climate-friendly diet.




Consumed


Book Description

By 2050, the world population is expected to reach nine billion. And the challenge of feeding this rapidly growing population is being made greater by climate change, which will increasingly wreak havoc on the way we produce our food. At the same time, we have lost touch with the soil—few of us know where our food comes from, let alone how to grow it—and we are at the mercy of multinational corporations who control the crops and give little thought to the damage their methods are inflicting on the planet. Our very future is at risk. In Consumed, Sarah Elton walks fields and farms on three continents, not only investigating the very real threats to our food, but also telling the little-known stories of the people who are working against time to create a new and hopeful future. From the mountains of southern France to the highlands of China, from the crowded streets of Nairobi to the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, we meet people from all walks of life who are putting together an alternative to the omnipresent industrial food system. In the arid fields of rural India we meet a farmer who has transformed her community by selling organic food directly to her neighbors. We visit a laboratory in Toronto where scientists are breeding a new kind of rice seed that they claim will feed the world. We learn about Italy’s underground food movement; how university grads are returning to the fields in China, Greece, and France; and how in Detroit, plots of vacant land planted with kale and carrots can help us see what’s possible. Food might be the problem, but as Elton shows, it is also the solution. The food system as we know it was assembled in a few decades—and if it can be built that quickly, it can be reassembled and improved in the same amount of time. Elton here lays out the targets we need to meet by the year 2050. The stories she tells give us hope for avoiding a daunting fate and instead help us to believe in a not-too-distant future when we can all sit at the table.




International Seminars On Nuclear War And Planetary Emergencies - 49th Session


Book Description

Proceedings of the 49th Session of the International Seminars on Nuclear War and Planetary Emergencies held in Erice, Sicily. This Seminar has again gathered, in 2016, over one hundred scientists from 43 countries in an interdisciplinary effort that has been going on for the last 33 years, to examine and analyze planetary problems which had been followed up, all year long, by the World Federation of Scientists' Permanent Monitoring Panels.




Rethinking Food and Agriculture


Book Description

Given the central role of the food and agriculture system in driving so many of the connected ecological, social and economic threats and challenges we currently face, Rethinking Food and Agriculture reviews, reassesses and reimagines the current food and agriculture system and the narrow paradigm in which it operates. Rethinking Food and Agriculture explores and uncovers some of the key historical, ethical, economic, social, cultural, political, and structural drivers and root causes of unsustainability, degradation of the agricultural environment, destruction of nature, short-comings in science and knowledge systems, inequality, hunger and food insecurity, and disharmony. It reviews efforts towards ‘sustainable development’, and reassesses whether these efforts have been implemented with adequate responsibility, acceptable societal and environmental costs and optimal engagement to secure sustainability, equity and justice. The book highlights the many ways that farmers and their communities, civil society groups, social movements, development experts, scientists and others have been raising awareness of these issues, implementing solutions and forging ‘new ways forward’, for example towards paradigms of agriculture, natural resource management and human nutrition which are more sustainable and just. Rethinking Food and Agriculture proposes ways to move beyond the current limited view of agro-ecological sustainability towards overall sustainability of the food and agriculture system based on the principle of ‘inclusive responsibility’. Inclusive responsibility encourages ecosystem sustainability based on agro-ecological and planetary limits to sustainable resource use for production and livelihoods. Inclusive responsibility also places importance on quality of life, pluralism, equity and justice for all and emphasises the health, well-being, sovereignty, dignity and rights of producers, consumers and other stakeholders, as well as of nonhuman animals and the natural world. Explores some of the key drivers and root causes of unsustainability , degradation of the agricultural environment and destruction of nature Highlights the many ways that different stakeholders have been forging 'new ways forward' towards alternative paradigms of agriculture, human nutrition and political economy, which are more sustainable and just Proposes ways to move beyong the current unsustainable exploitation of natural resources towards agroecological sustainability and overall sustainability of the food and agriculture system based on 'inclusive responsibility'




International Seminars On Nuclear War And Planetary Emergencies - 48th Session: The Role Of Science In The Third Millennium


Book Description

Proceedings of the 48th Session of the International Seminars on Nuclear War and Planetary Emergencies held in Erice, Sicily. This Seminar has again gathered, in 2015, over one hundred scientists from 43 countries in an interdisciplinary effort that has been going on for the last 32 years, to examine and analyze planetary problems which had been followed up, all year long, by the World Federation of Scientists' Permanent Monitoring Panels.




International Seminar On Nuclear War And Planetary Emergencies - 46th Session: The Role Of Science In The Third Millennium


Book Description

Proceedings of the 46th Session of the International Seminars on Nuclear War and Planetary Emergencies held in Erice, Sicily. This Seminar has again gathered, in 2013, over 100 scientists from 43 countries in an interdisciplinary effort that has been going on for the last 32 years, to examine and analyze planetary problems which had been followed up, all year long, by the World Federation of Scientists' Permanent Monitoring Panels.