• About
  • Contact
  • Advertise
  • Awards
  • Classifieds
  • Login
  • Login
No Result
View All Result
Membership
Quota Media
Omnibuzz

Food systems news

Tuesday July 5 2022

Great minds think aloud

  • News
    • All
    • In the news
    • Features
    • Opinion
    Mr Justice Linden: “If it contains excess fat, sugar or salt, that product is adverse to a child's health"

    Kellogg’s loses court case over sugary cereal

    Farmer Andy Pimbley examining ripening strawberries inside a polytunnel at Claremont Farm in Bebington on the Wirral © Colin McPherson/FT

    Labour shortfall leading to ‘catastrophic’ food waste

    The Longview Power Plant, a coal-fired plant, stands on August 21, 2018 in Maidsville, West Virginia. The plant’s single unit generates 700 net megawatts of electricity from run-of-mine coal and natural gas. Spencer Platt | Getty Images

    US Supreme Court limits EPA authority

    “Understanding the emergence of CC398 in European livestock is vitally important for managing the risk it poses to public health”

    Super bug that arose in pigs can jump to humans

    Martin Lines, UK chair for the Nature Friendly Farming Network, says farmers will continue moving away from fertilisers and pesticides

    Fertilisers: going cold turkey in a time of crisis

    European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides, and European Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevicius

    EU to halve use of pesticides, heal nature

    trade deals

    WTO strikes global trade deals after ‘roller coaster’ talks

    inflation

    Food inflation is swallowing Latin America’s dietary staples

    Protestors outside UK Parliament with a placard reading, "Keep the protocol, keep the peace."

    New EU legal action over post-Brexit deal changes

    Buyers at Risk Countries in Africa and Asia are among the most reliant on Ukraine grain

    US quietly urges Russia fertiliser deals

  • Business
  • Policy
  • Research
  • Sections
    • All
    • Retail
    • Data
    • Society
    • Environment
    • Economy
    • Health
    • Food Safety
    • Governance
    • Security
    • Sustainability
    • Agriculture
    • Rights
    • Tech
    Mr Justice Linden: “If it contains excess fat, sugar or salt, that product is adverse to a child's health"

    Kellogg’s loses court case over sugary cereal

    Farmer Andy Pimbley examining ripening strawberries inside a polytunnel at Claremont Farm in Bebington on the Wirral © Colin McPherson/FT

    Labour shortfall leading to ‘catastrophic’ food waste

    The Longview Power Plant, a coal-fired plant, stands on August 21, 2018 in Maidsville, West Virginia. The plant’s single unit generates 700 net megawatts of electricity from run-of-mine coal and natural gas. Spencer Platt | Getty Images

    US Supreme Court limits EPA authority

    “If we lose territory we lose everything. It’s that simple.” Pic: Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador

    Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples: we are protecting our territories

    “Understanding the emergence of CC398 in European livestock is vitally important for managing the risk it poses to public health”

    Super bug that arose in pigs can jump to humans

    Martin Lines, UK chair for the Nature Friendly Farming Network, says farmers will continue moving away from fertilisers and pesticides

    Fertilisers: going cold turkey in a time of crisis

    European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides, and European Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevicius

    EU to halve use of pesticides, heal nature

    Executive director of Nourish Scotland, Pete Ritchie: “If the UK could just get over itself, alignment on sustainable food with the EU would be helpful”

    Scottish food bill: a dram to celebrate the end of the beginning

    trade deals

    WTO strikes global trade deals after ‘roller coaster’ talks

    Trending Tags

    • Covid-19
    • UK
    • Retail
  • Comms unit
  • Shop
  • Events
  • News
    • All
    • In the news
    • Features
    • Opinion
    Mr Justice Linden: “If it contains excess fat, sugar or salt, that product is adverse to a child's health"

    Kellogg’s loses court case over sugary cereal

    Farmer Andy Pimbley examining ripening strawberries inside a polytunnel at Claremont Farm in Bebington on the Wirral © Colin McPherson/FT

    Labour shortfall leading to ‘catastrophic’ food waste

    The Longview Power Plant, a coal-fired plant, stands on August 21, 2018 in Maidsville, West Virginia. The plant’s single unit generates 700 net megawatts of electricity from run-of-mine coal and natural gas. Spencer Platt | Getty Images

    US Supreme Court limits EPA authority

    “Understanding the emergence of CC398 in European livestock is vitally important for managing the risk it poses to public health”

    Super bug that arose in pigs can jump to humans

    Martin Lines, UK chair for the Nature Friendly Farming Network, says farmers will continue moving away from fertilisers and pesticides

    Fertilisers: going cold turkey in a time of crisis

    European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides, and European Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevicius

    EU to halve use of pesticides, heal nature

    trade deals

    WTO strikes global trade deals after ‘roller coaster’ talks

    inflation

    Food inflation is swallowing Latin America’s dietary staples

    Protestors outside UK Parliament with a placard reading, "Keep the protocol, keep the peace."

    New EU legal action over post-Brexit deal changes

    Buyers at Risk Countries in Africa and Asia are among the most reliant on Ukraine grain

    US quietly urges Russia fertiliser deals

  • Business
  • Policy
  • Research
  • Sections
    • All
    • Retail
    • Data
    • Society
    • Environment
    • Economy
    • Health
    • Food Safety
    • Governance
    • Security
    • Sustainability
    • Agriculture
    • Rights
    • Tech
    Mr Justice Linden: “If it contains excess fat, sugar or salt, that product is adverse to a child's health"

    Kellogg’s loses court case over sugary cereal

    Farmer Andy Pimbley examining ripening strawberries inside a polytunnel at Claremont Farm in Bebington on the Wirral © Colin McPherson/FT

    Labour shortfall leading to ‘catastrophic’ food waste

    The Longview Power Plant, a coal-fired plant, stands on August 21, 2018 in Maidsville, West Virginia. The plant’s single unit generates 700 net megawatts of electricity from run-of-mine coal and natural gas. Spencer Platt | Getty Images

    US Supreme Court limits EPA authority

    “If we lose territory we lose everything. It’s that simple.” Pic: Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador

    Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples: we are protecting our territories

    “Understanding the emergence of CC398 in European livestock is vitally important for managing the risk it poses to public health”

    Super bug that arose in pigs can jump to humans

    Martin Lines, UK chair for the Nature Friendly Farming Network, says farmers will continue moving away from fertilisers and pesticides

    Fertilisers: going cold turkey in a time of crisis

    European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides, and European Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevicius

    EU to halve use of pesticides, heal nature

    Executive director of Nourish Scotland, Pete Ritchie: “If the UK could just get over itself, alignment on sustainable food with the EU would be helpful”

    Scottish food bill: a dram to celebrate the end of the beginning

    trade deals

    WTO strikes global trade deals after ‘roller coaster’ talks

    Trending Tags

    • Covid-19
    • UK
    • Retail
  • Comms unit
  • Shop
  • Events
No Result
View All Result
Quota Media
No Result
View All Result
Home Topics Economy

How should economists think about biodiversity?

A new report for the British government lays out a framework

February 7, 2021
in In the news, Environment, Research
0
How should economists think about biodiversity?
191
SHARES
2.1k
VIEWS
Share on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Facebook

The Economist looks at a new report on the economics of biodiversity commissioned by the British government, and produced by Partha Dasgupta of the University of Cambridge.

Breathable air, drinkable water and tolerable temperatures and the complex ecosystems that maintain them, tend to be taken for granted. This is more than a mere analytical oversight, reckons.

By overlooking the role nature plays in economic activity, economists underestimate the risks from environmental damage to growth and human welfare.

It makes the hard-headed case that services provided by nature are an indispensable input to economic activity. Some of these services are relatively easy to discern: fish stocks, say, in the open ocean. Others are far less visible: such as the complex ecosystems within soil that recycle nutrients, purify water and absorb atmospheric carbon. These are unfamiliar topics for economists, so the review seeks to provide a “grammar” through which they can be analysed.

The report features its own illustrative production function, which includes nature. The environment appears once as a source of flows of extractable resources (like fish or timber).

But it also shows up more broadly as a stock of “natural” capital from which humans derive “regulating and maintenance services”: the work of environmental cycles that refresh the air, churn waste products into nutrients, and keep global temperatures hospitable, among other things.

With this new production function in hand, economists can properly account for nature’s contributions to growth. Functions that omit nature misattribute its benefits to productivity, exaggerating human capabilities.

The inclusion of natural capital enables an analysis of the sustainability of current rates of economic growth.

As people produce GDP, they extract resources from nature and dump waste back into it. If this extraction and dumping exceeds nature’s capacity to repair itself, the stock of natural capital shrinks and with it the flow of valuable environmental services.

Between 1992 and 2014, according to a report published by the UN, the value of produced capital (such as machines and buildings) roughly doubled and that of human capital (workers and their skills) rose by 13%, while the estimated value of natural capital declined by nearly 40%.

The demands humans currently place on nature, in terms of resource extraction and the dumping of harmful waste, are roughly equivalent to the sustainable output of 1.6 Earths (of which, alas, there is only the one).

To reduce these demands without slowing growth would be a monumental task. Between 1992 and 2014, Professor Dasgupta estimates, the efficiency with which humans transformed natural capital into GDP grew at about 3.5% a year. To stop natural capital declining by 2030 while maintaining current growth trends, however, would require growth in efficiency of about 10% a year.

More here… 

Sign up for Best of Quota
  Thank you for Signing Up
Please correct the marked field(s) below.
1,true,6,Contact Email,2 1,false,1,First Name,2 1,false,1,Last Name,2
Tags: United KingdomBiodiversityNatural Capital
Previous Post

Calculate the environmental footprint of your food

Next Post

Fishing taskforce to tackle Brexit export ‘issues’

Next Post
Fishing taskforce to tackle Brexit export ‘issues’

Fishing taskforce to tackle Brexit export 'issues'

Please login to join discussion

Editor's Picks

“If we lose territory we lose everything. It’s that simple.” Pic: Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador
Rights

Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples: we are protecting our territories

by May Davies
July 1, 2022
0
1.1k

Indigenous protestors in Ecuador remain wary, despite the agreement which has ended 18 days of strikes in which at least...

Read more
"At SCOOP we don’t demand exclusivity and actively encourage farmers to find new and better markets for themselves." Pic: Cotswolds farmer by David George

Paying farmers 75p for each £1 consumers spend on their produce

May 23, 2022
2k
Signing ceremony of PAGES, in Brazil’s state with the highest poverty and food insecurity rates. Pic: IFAD/Tayna Abreu

Food security meets Amazon protection in new UN project

May 20, 2022
1.7k
Man holding his chin facing laptop

Companies urge convergence on climate reporting standards

May 20, 2022
1.6k
"People need time at point of sale to learn to eat in a way that protects the planet"

Shifting to care – the benefits of being the most inconvenient supermarket

May 2, 2022
1.4k
Twitter Youtube LinkedIn
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Awards
  • Contact
  • Shop
  • Classifieds
  • Events
  • Login

Popular Tags

Covid-19 United States United Kingdom Brexit United Nations 2021 Food Systems Summit European Union China Food and Agriculture Organization Food banks Meat Climate Change COP26 World Food Programme UK Nestle Food waste Farmers

Best of Quota

Our audience's free secret weapon, leaving others to ask, "What do they know, that I don't?"


Thank you for Signing Up
Please correct the marked field(s) below.
1,true,6,Contact Email,21,false,1,First Name,21,false,1,Last Name,2

© 2021 Quota Media Limited | All rights reserved | Registered Company Number 12581018      Online Web Fonts

Terms & Conditions      Privacy Policy      Ethical Policy      Cookie Policy     

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
  • Business
  • Policy
  • Research
  • Comms unit
  • Shop
  • Events
  • Membership subs
  • Awards
  • Contact
  • About

© 2021 Quota Media Limited | All rights reserved | Registered Company Number 12581018      Online Web Fonts

Terms & Conditions      Privacy Policy      Ethical Policy      Cookie Policy     

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In