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To effectively address the sustainability crises our planet faces, decision-makers at different levels of government worldwide will have to get a handle on three key challenges: learning from Global North and South initiatives in tandem, taking stock of social innovations alongside technological fixes, and nurturing grassroots sustainable development initiatives next to, or in place of, top-down corporate and government interventions. Current scientific literature and grant-making institutions have often reinforced the compartmentalized fashion in which we learn and draw policy lessons from North/South, social/technical, and bottom-up/top-down sustainability initiatives, including local food system innovations. The strategic levers for global sustainable development lying in-between are thus left out. This paper uses exploratory, multiple case study analysis to address this omission. By concurrently drawing lessons from grassroots innovations in Brazil, New York, and Senegal—three profoundly different socioeconomic and geographic contexts—we identify common pressure points that have enabled local communities to drive system-wide transformations toward climate adaptation, resilience, and sustainability in the agri-food system. The findings of this paper would be of value to scholars, government officials, and community groups engaged in agri-food systems sustainability and interested in the processes of change that have allowed budding innovations to stabilize and scale up.

AbstractIncreasing resource scarcity and what has been called “the end of cheap nature” are prompting policymakers and scholars to foster more circular economies to reduce waste and lengthen the lifespan of material goods. Our essay critically examines the political and economic relationships between urban and rural geographies in the context of secondhand economies. Practices of bartering, swapping, selling, and repairing used goods have long been important to rural people and places, but the increasing commodification of discards risks upending rural livelihoods and ways of being as goods move toward urban centers. We explore the relationship between rural and urban reuse economies and suggest how future scholars of rural North America might contribute to strengthening and supporting localized reuse practices.

The ability to quickly and non-destructively monitor the cadmium (Cd) content in agricultural crops is the basic premise of effective prevention and control of Cd contamination in agricultural products. Hyperspectral technology provides a solution for this issue. The potential capability for the spectral prediction of the Cd content in the leaves of pepper and eggplant in the field was explored, and a spectral prediction model of the Cd content in these leaves was established. In this study, based on the indoor spectrum, the sensitive wavebands for predicting the Cd content in leaves were determined preliminarily by correlation analysis. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) and support vector machine regression (SVMR) were used to establish spectral prediction models, and the final sensitive wavebands were determined by the size of the model index. The results show that the SVMR model exhibited higher prediction accuracy than the PLSR model. The RPDp (relative percent different of prediction set) values of the best SVMR prediction models for the pepper leaves and the eggplant leaves were 1.82 and 1.49, respectively. The values of Rp2 (coefficient of determination of prediction set), which can quantitatively estimate the Cd content in leaves, were 0.897 (p < 0.01) and 0.726 (p < 0.01), respectively. This study demonstrated that the leaf spectra of pepper and eggplant in the field can be used to predict the Cd content in leaves, providing a reference for monitoring the Cd content in the fruits of pepper and eggplant in the future.

Despite strong interest and conflict research spanning multiple disciplines, connections between water flows and conflicts remain unclear, due to incomplete datasets on water-related conflict-cooperation events and poor understanding of socioeconomic and biophysical causes of such conflicts. The dataset on water-related conflict-cooperation events compiled in this study extends to 2019, updating previous datasets that covered only up to 2008, yielding important new insights on cooperation-conflict trends. Global and regional trends were analyzed using the new events dataset, together with changes in hydroclimatic variables and population density. The analysis revealed that water-related cooperation was far more common than conflicts across all regions, in both drier and wetter climates, indicating that abundance and lack of water can both promote cooperation. However, conflict events were more common in drier climates where water is scarcer. This cooperation-conflict balance shifted in the 2000s, with conflict events increasing, to outnumber cooperation events in 2017. The main shift occurred in Africa and Asia, where increased conflicts in Africa coincided with a prolonged period of below-average precipitation and severe drought, while the shift in Asia coincided with increased evapotranspiration caused by human activities and increased population density. Differences between regions were confirmed by event descriptions, with events in Africa relating to water access and farmer-herder conflicts, and events in Asia relating to irrigation and dam construction. These differences highlight the need for regional-scale analysis of water-related conflict-cooperation trends and pathways. With climate change and human activities expected to increase, the increasing trend in conflict events could persist, with water resources becoming a more frequent cause of future conflict. Identifying these complex cooperation-conflict changes is vital in determining future actions required to reduce conflict events and promote cooperation on water.

A large number of governance interventions are being developed in order to reduce deforestation and enhance the sustainability of commodity supply chains across the tropics. The extent to which individual agricultural commodity supply chain interventions can achieve scale, and environmental or social objectives, depends in part on the ways in which those interventions interact with other interventions. We use a case-study of the new Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) cattle certification program in Brazil to explore the different ways in which governance interventions interact. We examine the broad landscape of policies and programs that affect sustainability in the cattle supply chain in Brazil, and assess whether such interventions support or constrain the scaling up of the SAN cattle program. We conducted semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders from government, private sector, and civil society organizations. We found that multiple interventions are acting in a complementary manner to enhance sustainability and therefore enable the scaling up of the SAN program, by aiding compliance with environmental laws, adoption of good production practices, and improved monitoring. At the same time, limited development, implementation, and complementarity of some interventions could be antagonistic to the SAN program's expansion because they maintain a context in which many actors operate far below the sustainability criteria required by the program. Our holistic approach enables us to identify specific gaps in the complex landscape of governance interventions in Brazil. Greater strategic complementarity and coordination between interventions may catalyze a more coherent and effective pathway to reduced deforestation and enhanced sustainability.

IntroductionIn this article we explore the practice of sustainable home cooking from a philosophical perspective.MethodologyWe analyze the practice of sustainble homecooking on the basis of the theory of modal aspects (Dooyeweerd) and the Triple I model (Verkerk and others).Results and discussionPhilosophy offers a fascinating perspective on sustainable home cooking. First, it shows the richtness of the phenomenon of home cooking. Second, it shows that home cooking constists out of two sub practices: preparing a meal and eating a dish. Each of these sub practices has an own identity and own inherent values. Third, the transition to sustainable home cooking requires three related strategies. (1) A transition of present home cooking practices to a sustainable practice by focussing on the inherent values of sustainable home cooking. (2) A transition of the whole food chain to a sustainable one. (3) A transition in the ideals and basic beliefs of society about sustainable home cooking.

It is critical to encourage farmers to adopt agriculture technology that is beneficial to the environment in the context of the ongoing emphasis on the ecological growth of agriculture, yet risk and uncertainty diminish the incentive to adopt these technologies. This research examines whether crop insurance might affect and increase willingness to adopt Environmentally Friendly Agricultural Technology (EFAT) from a psychological perspective, utilizing data from 219 questionnaires in Shandong Province. The findings suggest that crop insurance can boost readiness to embrace technology in three ways: motivation, ability, and opportunity; however, the positive effect of motivation on farmers diminishes as capacity increases. Insurance companies must offer products that contain the risk of adopting EFAT as an insurance obligation as soon as feasible to successfully boost willingness to use technologies and collaborate with agricultural technology departments to provide farmers with training as well as disaster avoidance services.

Abstract This paper reports meta-regressions of substitution elasticities between greenhouse gas (GHG) polluting and nonpolluting inputs in agricultural production, which is the main feedstock source for biofuel in the U.S. We treat energy, fertilizer, and manure collectively as the “polluting input” and labor, land, and capital as nonpolluting inputs. We estimate meta-regressions for samples of Morishima substitution elasticities for labor, land, and capital vs. the polluting input. Much of the heterogeneity of Morishima elasticities can be explained by type of primal or dual function, functional form, type and observational level of data, input categories, number of outputs, type of output, time period, and country categories. Each estimated long-run elasticity for the reference case, which is most relevant for assessing GHG emissions through life-cycle analysis, is greater than 1.0 and significantly different from zero. Most predicted long-run elasticities remain significantly different from zero at the data means. These findings imply that life-cycle analysis based on fixed proportion production functions could provide grossly inaccurate measures of GHG of biofuel.