Re-blogged from Relational Thinking – The People and Nature Blog In this blog post Shonil Bhagwat, a professor at The Open University, discusses their highlights of the Research Article they …

The answer to this question is the 'Four Betters' framework put forward by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (#FAO). These four betters are: Better Production, Better Nutrition, Better Environment and Better Life. But what do these Four Betters actually mean in practice? That was the question that the Foods Futures event on the #WorldFoodDay on 16th October 2025 - FAO's 80th birthday - set out to answer.

🥗 To celebrate this landmark birthday of an iconic institution, I am looking forward to taking part in this event on Thursday, 16th October to explore the #future of #food and #agriculture through the lens of #FAO's #4Betters. 🌾 Ever since the 1996 World Food Summit ( availability, access, utilisation, and stability are thought of as the four pillars of…

Hello from Italy! What if I told you that armed soldiers are involved in safeguarding forests and protecting wildlife - not in the Serengeti National Park in Africa, not in Sariska Tiger Reserve in India, but in Southern Europe?! Yes, you heard that right, in Southern Europe, in Italy to be precise. I had never thought that militarised conservation exists anywhere in the Global North, let alone in Europe, until I went to a conference last week on the topic of old growth forests and ancient trees.

Every heard of the ‘leaky pipeline’? NO, don’t worry, I am not complaining about British Gas or Thames Water, and there is no burst boiler at home, luckily! Leaky pipeline is a phrase that describes the loss of talented individuals with a lot of potential from certain professions. And environmental professions, sadly, are full of leaky pipes, which desperately need fixing!

Do you ever get that gut feeling about something? What if I told you that there is more to that feeling than meets the eye, or rather brain. There is actually a direct connection between our gut and our brain. A nerve called the Vagus nerve carries the signals between the two. Even more astonishingly, there are molecules, typically protein molecules that our body produces, which are able to cross the so-called blood-brain barrier.

Five years ago The Guardian reported that only one in five UK universities were 'decolonising' their curriculum. Today, almost every department in almost every university is decolonising their curriculum. For me, decolonisation of knowledge is a no-brainer! There are many different knowledge systems consisting of Indigenous knowledge, local knowledge and traditional knowledge, and that variety is necessary to make sense of the world we live in today.

Njung'e Wanjiru's brilliant artwork produced at the ‘Seeds 4 Tomorrow’ workshop in Cambridge - - takes you on a journey through a corn field and shows why we need crop diversity. The Seeds 4 Tomorrow workshop convened by Franziska Fischer, Maysoun Mustafa, Matthew Davies and colleagues at the Archaeology Department in Cambridge set out to develop a community of practice (