Month: December 2015

Hello and welcome to our December newsletter! The Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – better known as COP21  – is underway in Paris. As we saw in the run up, with the Bonn talks we covered recently, nation states mostly argue their corner and real ambition is quite low: 2.7 degrees Celsius warming might be an optimistic outcome of the COP21, based on Bonn – and that’s hardly enough to prevent runaway climate change, when 2 degrees is the recognised ceiling. Agri-food is implicated in both Climate Change mitigation and adaptation. We’vesharpened our focus on these plus on regenerative agriculture, on soil, land use change and a host of other factors. In short we believe there are ways food production can become truly sustainable as outlined by IPES and others over recent months. This involves climate change and other food security, agroecology and food sovereigntydimensions, as we explore in numerous posts on our site. Let’s all work towards a real, sustainable agri-food sector, one that can hep us cope with […]

Hello and welcome to our November newsletter!Can rural areas step up to help with Europe’s refugee crisis? What is the rural response to climate change? And what are the core issues of inequality between rural and urban regions in the EU? These and other topics questions are being assessed this coming week in Austria at the second European Rural Parliament. (Live video links also at post)We’ve been busy covering GMO’s in recent weeks: EU Member States and regions have either opted in or out of the option of growing, and that has divided the UK. Romanian farmers however, seem unified in their rejection of the technology. In what has been one of our most popular stories ever – one with some real detective work conducted by Ramona from Eco Ruralis – we reveal how much a failed crop GM Maize is in what was once the darling nation-state of the biotech sector. (This story has been shared from our site over 11,000 times on facebook, a stat which excludes other shares from elsewhere). Some more […]