Published: 31-10-2024
Engineered puffins, facial recognition for wildlife, ‘disestablishment’ of crucial horizon-scanning and disregard for international treaties. As COP16 wraps up in Cali, Colombia, here’s a trick-or-treat guide to what, sort of, just happened.
Published: 01-10-2024
The Royal Agricultural University’s Cultured Meat & Farmers project was a two-year study that examined the potential impact of cultured meat on UK farmers. Now that it’s wrapping up, what did we learn?
Published: 26-09-2024
A new report from A Bigger Conversation argues that the concept of sustainability has become distorted and compromised, and needs to be radically rethought. It explores how we can shift to a life-centric approach, linked to a core philosophy that sustainability must first and foremost sustain life.
Published: 24-09-2024
If you can’t control or predict the future, how can you prepare for it? In his new book, Prof Ian Scoones suggests that in an increasingly unpredictable world conventional risk management – in finance and banking, critical infrastructures, pandemics, disasters and climate change and technology – is no longer working.
Published: 05-08-2024
In its 2019 report on Regulation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the UK government describes a future characterised by a fusion of technologies and a blurring of the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds. Prof Brigitte Nerlich, offers her thoughts on responsibility in a bio-hybrid world where fact meets fiction.
Published: 17-06-2024
Who do the ‘techno-optimists’ and gene-editing boosters speak for? As Prof David Christian Rose argued at a recent conference it isn’t necessarily farmers or citizens.
Published: 28-05-2024
A new report from A Bigger Conversation shows that while agroecological farmers, working in a values-based system, have an interest in technology that serves those values, they have little interest in technology that does not. Its findings emphasise the importance of a more critical and context-specific approach to technological innovation, which contrasts with ‘hard sell’ of Agriculture 4.0.
Published: 14-11-2023
At its core, powerful institutions have exploited public confidence and trust that science is produced in a neutral and impartial manner. But when private industry information is not subject to robust debate and challenge, it’s propaganda. Call it what it is and we might be able to start changing things.
Published: 28-10-2023
Genetically engineered organisms in agriculture are, first and foremost, a food system and environmental issue. In recent years the UK government has sought to recontextualise them as a science and innovation issue divorced from their real world uses and consequences. Our 2024 manifesto calls for GMOs to be put back in their rightful context and for this to be the basis for rational policy and regulation of agricultural genetic technologies.
Published: 29-06-2023
Do agroecological farmers need to ‘tech up’ to be more sustainable? Our Agroecological Intelligence project, brings together UK farmers from across the agroecological spectrum – including as organic, biodynamic, permaculture, food sovereignty, nature friendly, pasture-fed and regenerative – with the aim of understanding what they want from technology and how they make choices around it. Read the interim report.