Just out in Human Ecology is a new paper – People, patches and parasites: the case of trypanosomiasis in Zimbabwe. It’s open access, so do have a look! It presents the results of a project looking at the socio-ecology of disease in Africa – part of the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium –…
NEW PAPER: People, patches and parasites
Why Mumbai’s floods are an urban planning disaster
by Hans Nicolai Adam, Lyla Mehta and D. Parthasarathy, Climate Change, Uncertainty and Transformation project As Houston was inundated by ‘biblical’ rainfall and grapples with extreme flooding and its aftermath, another coastal megacity on the other side of the globe also experienced destructive flooding, albeit on a lesser scale. Within the span of a couple…
How do we ensure values are at the heart of resilience science?
We live and work now perhaps more than ever before in the time of science for transformation. This was the central theme of discussions in Stockholm during the Resilience 2017 and Sustainability Science conferences held back to back from 21-26 August. The transformative intention of these events is particularly relevant at this time of increasing…
Coming to terms with messiness: What is a ‘Transformation Lab’?
In this blog post, Laura Pereira explains the idea of a ‘Transformation Lab’ (T-lab). T-labs are being used in our Pathways Network project in 6 countries to try to enable socio-ecological transformations. In the post, Laura uses an example of a completed T-lab from the GRAID research project in South Africa. For a short summary…
The global food system still benefits the rich at the expense of the poor
Ramen noodles in Sweden, wheat bread in Tanzania and Chilean wines in China. The cross-Atlantic transit of the potato and the tomato from the Andes to Europe, and back again as French fries and pasta sauce. We think of the world as globalised and sophisticated in its food tastes, and our palettes as curious and…
Can open and collaborative approaches change the world?
by Patrick van Zwanenberg, Mariano Fressoli, Valeria Arza and Adrian Smith Around the world, people are changing how things are made and how knowledge is produced, by involving more people, opening up data, and sharing skills and insights with these activities across communities, countries or continents. Experimentation with radically open and collaborative ways of producing…
Why will no one listen to the pig farmers of Yangon?
Sitting in a pig farmer’s house in the Yangon region of Myanmar, I heard a question I’d heard many times before from backyard farmers: “What will your project provide us with?” It was my last month of a year in Myanmar, undertaking fieldwork for the social science component of the Myanmar Pig Partnership, a project looking…
Brexit and food: there is no plan, so what is the UK going to put on the table?
by Tim Lang, City, University of London; Erik P Millstone, University of Sussex, and Terry Marsden, Cardiff University Even the British eat. But one might be forgiven for thinking that the UK government does not know this for all the attention it has paid to the implications of Brexit for UK consumers and the nation’s…
A day in the Chinampas
In the wetlands of Xochimilco in Mexico, farming is carried out in a system going back to Mesoamerican times, in chinampas – rectangular floating fields growing crops on a shallow lake. The area is changing rapidly with competing pressures from farming, urbanization and pollution, and we’ve been exploring how local people can respond to this…
How Kerala is making the transition towards healthy, home-grown food
In Kerala, agri-food systems are in transition towards self-reliance and sustainability. Through bringing traditional gardening into the mainstream food agenda, and adopting technologies and practices like agroecology, growers and consumers in Kerala are trying to overcome the impacts of external food dependency and related vulnerabilities. Debates on sustainable food systems are still largely trapped in…