English references

Five of the seven breached planetary boundaries are linked to food systems. By transforming production and adopting a “planetary health diet,” we can halve food-related climate emissions and prevent millions of deaths, according to the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission.

There are four key ways of measuring energy. These metrics capture the transformations and losses that occur across the energy chain. The differences between the first stage (‘primary energy’) and the last (‘useful energy’) can be very large. This means it’s important to be clear about which metric is being referred to when people speak about data on “energy”. In this post I explain these four metrics.

The climate and ecological crisis poses an unprecedented challenge, with scientists playing a critical role in how society understands and responds. This study examined how 27 environmentally concerned scientists from 11 countries construct the future in the context of climate change, applying a critical discursive psychology analysis. The degree to which the future is constructed as predetermined or transformable impacts both the urgency and scope of proposed actions. ...

Simultaneous harvest failures across major crop-producing regions are a threat to global food security. Concurrent weather extremes driven by a strongly meandering jet stream could trigger such events, but so far this has not been quantified. Specifically, the ability of state-of-the art crop and climate models to adequately reproduce such high impact events is a crucial component for estimating risks to global food security. Here we find an increased likelihood of concurrent low yields during summers featuring meandering jets in observations and models. While climate models accurately simulate atmospheric patterns, associated surface weather anomalies and negative effects on crop responses are mostly underestimated in bias-adjusted simulations. Given the identified model biases, future assessments of regional and concurrent crop losses from meandering jet states remain highly uncertain. Our results suggest that model-blind spots for such high-impact but deeply-uncertain hazards have to be anticipated and acc

How is it possible to own land? The current pattern of ownership and control of land lies at the heart of many of our biggest dysfunctions: the collapse of wildlife and ecosystems, the exclusion and marginalization of so many people, the lack of housing in many cities—indeed, in many parts of the world—the lack of public space in cities, our exclusion from the countryside. The pattern of land ownership underlies all of these massive issues, and indeed of many more. Yet we rarely question it.

Radical Transformation is a story about industrial civilization’s impending collapse, and about the possibilities of averting this fate. Human communities first emerged as egalitarian, democratic groups that existed in symbiotic relationship with their environments. Increasing complexity led to the emergence of oligarchy, in which societies became captive to the logic of domination, exploitation, and ecological destruction. The challenge facing us today is to build a movement that will radically transform civilization and once more align our evolutionary trajectory in the direction of democracy, equality, and ecological sustainability.

Capitalism isn’t what it used to be. Since 2008, critics of the world’s dominant economic system have been lamenting its imperviousness to change. And for good reason. In earlier epochs, financial crises and pandemics wrought economic transformation. In our own, they seem to have yielded more of the same. Before the 2008 crash, global capitalism was characterized by organized labor’s weakness, rising inequality within nations, and a growth model that offset mediocre wage gains with asset-price appreciation. All of these have remained features of the world’s economic order.

The astonishing story of how the US entered the second world war should be on everyone’s minds as Cop26 approaches

This book explores how the State can play a role as an enabler of citizens-led social innovations, to accelerate the shift to sustainable and socially just lifestyles.

Climate change and deforestation have flipped a large swathe of the Amazon basin from absorbing to emitting planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2), a transformation that could turn humanity's greatest natural ally in the fight against global warming into a foe, researchers reported on Wednesday.