Thammasat University students are cordially invited to participate in a Wednesday, 12 May free online lecture on Engaging the public in changing food systems to tackle climate change.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about food systems and climate change.
The event will be hosted by the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at the University of Bath and Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) and will be seen online at midnight Bangkok time.
As the IPR website explains,
About this Event
In this talk, co-hosted with Cardiff University Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST), Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh will argue for the importance of engaging the public in the changes required to address climate change, particularly focusing on changing consumers’ food choices and food system change.
She will present insights on public views on low-carbon, sustainable food policies from Climate Assembly UK – the first UK-wide citizen’s assembly on climate change, and present findings from research into how to change diets to promote low-carbon, sustainable food choices.
The TU Library owns a book coauthored by Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh.
Engaging the public with climate change: behaviour change and communication is shelved in in the General Stacks of the Sanya Dharmasakti Library, Faculty of Law, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus.
The TU Library also owns the Routledge handbook of environment and communication which contains a chapter written by Professor Whitmarsh on Publics, communication campaigns and persuasive communication.
The book is shelved in the General Stacks of the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication Library, Tha Prachan campus.
As her university webpage notes,
Professor Whitmarsh is an environmental psychologist, specializing in perceptions and behavior in relation to climate change, energy and transport, based in the Department of Psychology, University of Bath. She is also Director of the ESRC-funded UK Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST).
She regularly advises governmental and other organizations on low-carbon behavior change and climate change communication, was one of the expert leads for Climate Assembly UK, and is Lead Author for IPCC’s Working Group II Sixth Assessment Report. Her research projects have included studies of meat consumption, energy efficiency behaviors, waste reduction and carrier bag reuse, perceptions of smart technologies and electric vehicles, low-carbon lifestyles, and responses to climate change.
Innovative research
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger and improve nutrition and food security.
As a FAO online report from last month indicates,
From zero-deforestation cocoa production to energy efficient fuel, FAO and the Green Climate Fund are fighting climate change around the world with innovative projects.
If we want to tackle climate change, our agri-food systems are one of the key places to start. We need to look at the way we farm, the way we eat and the way we use our natural resources. Agriculture emits around one quarter of greenhouse gases, but it also holds many of the solutions to global climate goals. Meeting the climate challenge starts with transforming food and agriculture.
From restoring degraded lands to eliminating food waste, every action we take must help our global communities adapt to new pressures, such as a growing population and urbanization, all the while protecting the planet’s resources and biodiversity.
Since 2016, FAO has been partnering with the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to help countries build resilience in response to climate change impacts.
Among FAO and GCF projects:
Reversing land degradation for better food and water security in Nepal
Ensuring the sustainable, long-term restoration of land, soil and forests means working with local communities to prevent and reverse land degradation, combining local knowledge with science and technology to find a new way forward.
Nepal’s Churia region in the Himalayan foothills is critical to the country’s food security. Major river systems pass through the Churia hills and serve as an important water source for communities downstream. However, decades of unsustainable use of natural resources have led to forest degradation, increased flooding and soil erosion. Since May 2020, FAO has been working alongside its national partners to implement a USD 40 million GCF-funded project that will help maintain the region’s landscapes. It will benefit more than 200 000 households and help them mitigate the effects of a changing climate and extreme weather events in the years to come.
Investing in cocoa production that maintains rather than clears forest canopies is crucial to stopping deforestation in tropical countries.
Zero-deforestation cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire
Cocoa is consumed worldwide in all kinds of food products, from luxury chocolates to sweet beverages. However, cocoa production is a main cause of deforestation in tropical countries like Côte d’Ivoire. In fact, 62 percent of the country’s deforestation is attributed to agriculture, and about one-third to cocoa production alone. Around two million smallholder producers depend on cocoa farming for their livelihoods.
The first FAO-led, GCF project in Africa will support Côte d’Ivoire’s efforts to tackle deforestation while improving the livelihoods of vulnerable farmers by boosting zero-deforestation cocoa production. The project encourages naturally-shaded cocoa agroforestry systems, which mean that forests do not have to be cut down to make way for full-sun cocoa production. Producing cocoa under dense, tropical forest canopies can help developing countries lower their greenhouse gas emissions, conserve and protect biodiversity and at the same time generate income for small-scale cocoa producers.
Building the resilience of vulnerable communities and ecosystems is central to both green recovery efforts and climate action. In just over four years, FAO has supported more than 36 countries in accessing GCF resources to meet their climate goals. FAO continues to drive momentum on climate action so countries can scale up their actions, build back better from crises and create a more sustainable world free from hunger.
The European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies of the World Health Organization (WHO) has also published an informative study on Connecting food systems for co-benefits: How can food systems combine diet-related
health with environmental and economic policy goals?
It notes:
This Policy Brief explores how food systems can combine diet-related health with environmental and economic policy goals. It builds on considerable earlier work by analyzing the connections between different policy goals, and between policy goals and food systems. Through this process it identifies three core aspects of food systems functioning which would need to connect in order to produce co-benefits: economic benefits for farmers and businesses being created (1) through the production and delivery of nutritious foods throughout the system (2), using environmentally-sustainable production methods (3). To move towards this aspirational vision for food systems, it identifies specific opportunities where diet-related health, economic and environmental goals could connect for co-benefits. The Policy Brief takes a food systems approach in its analysis because different aspects of food are connected and do not exist in isolation. By focusing on connections, a food systems approach enables the identification of common causes of multiple outcomes and how these outcomes are connected, and therefore how connections can be leveraged for cobenefits for more than one policy goal.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Comnmons)