Published: 18-12-2024
In 2024 we briefly considered – but rejected – a cheeky suggestion to bring back the provocative term ‘Frankenfoods’. The days of that kind of polemic may have passed but, as we note in our year-end reflection, the story of the Modern Prometheus still has something to teach us about foresight and accountability.
Published: 28-11-2024
How important is it for us to trust the food we eat? In this Q&A, food scientist and ethicist Ralph Early argues that trust and honesty are fundamental to the relationship between governments, citizens and food producers and should inform how we interact with the environment and regulate emerging food technologies.
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.