All publications and documents

Land use for food production is important, but can put unnecessary pressure on natural systems. In this way, our diets are contributing to the continual worsening of a broad range of environmental problems, not just climate change – for example increasing levels of pollution and loss of biodiversity. Because many of these issues are broadly proportional to how much land we use, and how…

The world faces an escalating challenge to meet accelerating demand (driven by both increasing population and per-capita income growth) for sustainable, nutritious food in the face of multiple constraints – climate change, human population pressure, local and global resource scarcity, and ecosystem preservation (Freibauer et al., 2011). About one billion people in the world live in conditions of…

This report explores how the management of land-based biomass production and consumption can be developed towards a higher degree of sustainability across different scales: from the sustainable management of soils on the field to the sustainable management of global land use as a whole. Under business as usual conditions, the growing demand for food and non-food biomass could lead to a gross…

The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Climate Change’s report, Climate Adaptation: Seizing the Challenge, captures some of the latest thinking in the field of climate adaptation and financing, with the goal of assisting decision-makers in the public and private sectors gain a better understanding of the issue.

The Global Risks 2014 report highlights how global risks are not only interconnected but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies between risks, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain…

Land rights are rapidly becoming the new political battleground, central to discussions on climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, corporate sustainability, gender equality, and even democracy itself. As the world attempts to recover financial stability, and as an increasing number of countries in Africa and elsewhere seek to emulate the economic success of the Asian “tiger…