Back in October 2020 we sat together – around a zoom screen – with a diversity of stakeholders engaged and interested in agriculture and food production in the North of The Netherlands. Farmers, advisors, input suppliers, researchers, NGOs, private firms, public communicators and lobbyists were part of the initial discussions. All with the goal of supporting a transition to agroecology and regenerative farming in the region. As a Professor on Resilient Landscapes at Groningen University, I was one of the stakeholders contributing from the realm of the academia. We came up with the idea of sett ..read more

In Latin America, the so-called ‘informal sector’ associated with family farming and agroecological movements was essential to face and adapt to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. A few months after the start of the pandemic, and together with colleagues from different research organisations in Latin America, we organized a study to evaluate the nature and scope of the early initiatives (first three months) deployed by this informal sector to face and adapt to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food production and consumption in several Latin American countries. Information was coll ..read more

I was invited to write a commentary on Maikel Kuijper‘s article “The most important invention of the 20th century keeps us alive but is killing the environment. The solution? Eat less meat” published this week in The Correspondent. The triggering question for my commentary was: One way to feed the world and cut back on fertiliser is to change our diets – but how do we achieve the buy-in for this? Do you have other ideas? Here is what I answered, complemented with some links, graphs and references: In the 1990s it was still possible to smoke in designated seats in commercial flights (many aircr ..read more

Human activities associated with the production or harvesting of food, fibre and energy from terrestrial ecosystems have enormous impacts on biodiversity. In terms of food provision, more than 80% of the calories and about 60% of the protein in human food supply are provided by terrestrial plants, and respectively 16 and 33% of them by terrestrial animals. Land use choices to meet this and future food demands have enormous implications for biodiversity. They affect the balance between domesticated and wild biodiversity through their impact on the size and quality of habitats, on the partitioni ..read more

Agroecology is gaining momentum in sub-Saharan Africa. Barely more than ten years after the Nyèlèni declaration, the region counts a substantial number of initiatives around agroecology. They range from individual farmers and/or grass-root organization initiatives, closely associated with social movements, to initiatives that are initiated and/or supported by international NGOs – some of them with a seat in Africa, others leading from their headquarters abroad. Even some of the international research for development (R4D) centres active in the region, such as CIRAD or Bioversity, are supportin ..read more

In the 1940s a group of competent toxicologists led by William B. Deichmann conducted a number of thorough studies using state-of-the-art methods to conclude that the active ingredient dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT, could be safely released to the environment for its use as insecticide. DDT was one of the first wide spread synthetic pesticides, and its widespread use led to resistance in many insect species.     As can be seen in the pictures, DDT was promoted to be used as insect repellent directly on human skin, to treat food products, or to impregnate the wall paper of ..read more

Tipping points are common in nature. When systems are disturbed beyond a certain point – a tipping point – they may undergo irreversible or hardly reversible changes that provoke shifts towards undesirable system states. It is often difficult to get systems back from this new ‘stable’ yet undesirable situation. Examples are many. A classical one comes from the work of Marten Scheffer in The Netherlands. He studied the dynamics of shallow lakes as they undergo phases of turbidity as influenced by nutrient loads or pollution. You can find out more about his work here.   How about agricultu ..read more

The increasing recognition that current agriculture is unsustainable, responsible for the loss of biodiversity and habitats, for the rapid exhaustion of non-renewable resources, and for serious impacts on the climate, the environment and people’s health, leads to the continuous emergence of neologisms to express the need for a new global agricultural model. Examples of these include: Sustainable intensification Ecological intensification Agroecological intensification Climate smart agriculture Evergreen agriculture Eco-efficient agriculture Conservation agriculture Biodiverse farming (Kremen ..read more

The open-source journal SOIL of the European Geosciences Union is not just open source but also interactive. After a ‘traditional’ peer-review process is completed, scientific papers are posted on-line for the wider community to react to and comment on them. I was invited to contribute a piece about the contribution of soil science to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2): End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.  Euphemistically, the paper is entitled: Feeding the world with soil science: embracing sustainability ..read more

What can soil scientist do to contribute to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Plenty of things indeed. The achievement of UN SDGs depends largely on ecosystem services and many of these depend in their turn on key soil functions.  This is well explained in this graphical abstract published by Keesstra et al. (2016) in the open-source journal SOIL of the European Geo-scineces Union. Graphical abstract (for print) 20151223 In this FORUM paper we explore and discuss how soil scientists can rise to the challenge of reaching the UN SDGs both internally, i ..read more