Lockdown reading: 8 of the best book recommendations for sustainability and energy professionals

This paper explores the emergence of forms of ‘beyond farm’ assurance in the aquaculture sector, designed to increase the inclusion of smallholders and scale up environmental sustainability. The analysis reveals a ‘spectrum of assurance’, representing contrasting levels of trust in sustainable production and consumption. At one end of this spectrum attempts emerge to foster self-determined assurance models with internal verification that represent growing trust in the ability of subjects to organize sustainability improvements that extend beyond individual farms.

Using a novel modelling approach, new research published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution reveals the location and intensity of key threats to biodiversity on land and identifies priority areas across the world to help inform conservation decision making at national and local levels. A team of leading researchers have produced global maps for the six main threats affecting terrestrial amphibians, birds and mammals: agriculture, hunting and trapping, logging, pollution, invasive species, and climate change. Results show that agriculture and logging are pervasive in the tropics and that hunting and trapping is the most geographically widespread threat to mammals and birds. There are sizeable continental areas in which there is more than a 50% chance that any particular amphibian, mammal or bird species is threatened by logging, hunting and trapping, agriculture, invasive species or climate change.