Monday 31 August 2009

Future of food

George Alagiah has just presented this brilliant BBC2 documentary called the Future of Food. It integrates all the issues from global population, peak oil, peak soil, peak, local food everything through to sustainability, virtual water, farming methods, food production etc etc. It is a must watch programme.

It is available on the BBC iPlayer

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3

Try and find the time to watch it

Wednesday 19 August 2009

What Comes After Conservation?

Readers may be interested in this thought provoking article by Alex Hunt, Head of Foresight.

The National Trust has a seemingly rare attribute in modern society in having both a desire and capability to think and act for the long-term. Words and phrases with connotations of the long-term - like “in perpetuity”, “forever”, “enduring” and “endowment” - infuse our language. When it comes to nature conservation, we are able to be deliberately long-term in our effort. Few others are afforded this necessary luxury.

Yet the future for which we are planning for today will not offer us an unchanging terrain. We know this from our past. During the lifetime of the National Trust we have experienced two World Wars, seen the transition from the coal to nuclear age, witnessed the UK population grow exponentially, seen the tentative first few metres of flight be transformed into space exploration, and the communications revolution take us from Marconi to Microsoft. The consequential environmental quake which has followed all this change has made us recognise that we have well and truly moved from the Holocene into the Anthropocene.

It is therefore timely, as we rush headlong towards the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century – and having tasted what this Century might have in store - to ask ourselves two long-term questions:
1) What might we anticipate as the forces which will shape the natural environment across the 21st Century?
2) What might this mean for our approach to nature conservation, in the context of our mission of looking after special places, both now and in the future?

Anticipating 21st Century Forces for Change
The advice of an early American colonial almanac wisely reminds us that “to this all predictions do belong, that either they are right, or they are wrong”. I therefore offer some cautious ‘anticipations’ of the possible shape of things to come:

Global resource challenges are likely to be more strongly felt in UK landscape than ever before: a triumvirate of resource challenges, of energy, water and food will collide in the coming decades with the forces of population growth and a changing climate. This will introduce increasing pressures on landscapes in our care, and the underlying dynamics of the wider natural environment in which they sit.


Such resource pressures may increase public recognition of the importance of the ecosystem services which underpin daily life, and also accelerate innovations which help us live with limited resources. We may move from a cradle to grave economy (based on mining, making, buying, binning which we will not be able to afford) to a cradle to cradle economy (based on a continuous cycle of biological and industrial ‘nutrients’ in which there is no ‘waste’). Yet the potential is high for our growing resource demands to outstrip the needed investments in environmental innovation and nature’s capital.

Bio and nano-sciences will bring untold understanding, powers, opportunities and risks, within reach: as we increase our knowledge of nature at the genetic level, and of materials at the nano-scale, we will eventually see a convergence of these technologies. In the short term, we should not be surprised if we see wider and sometimes surprising application of Genetically Modified Organisms and new technologies (for example in efforts to increase productivity of biofuels, in producing animal feeds, in pharmaceutical GMOs, in monitoring and managing environment quality (e.g. through nanosensors, etc) or in remediation of environmental problems such as pollution. We will though see increasing concern about a lag in a coherent and consistent regulatory framework to manage risks from emerging and novel GMO and nano technologies.

We will face a growing challenge and new phenomenon in how humans connect with the natural world: as we see a growth in the urbanity of many people’s lives, we should not be surprised if we see a continuing disconnection with wildlife amongst parts of the population. This may be amplified by increasing competition for attention from the hyperreality offered by other experiences in daily urban life and leisure. Paradoxically new communication and media technologies, such as augmented reality, might start to provide a window on the natural world in ways which many people will have not been able to experience before. But urbanisation of people’s lives will predominantly serve to increase the disparity between environmental ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.

Climate change will converge with other environmental, social and economic challenges: the interplay between climate and the wider environment will greatly rise in significance, so that we rapidly move beyond seeing climate change as a discrete challenge to one which touches and is integrated into every part of the environment and economy. There will be very positive opportunities for us to find ‘win wins’ in facing the challenge of climate change, i.e. finding solutions around land use which foster other benefits beyond addressing climate change alone. But we will have to accept that there will be sizeable knock-on impacts on the dynamics of the natural environment which will be difficult to manage.

Facing the 21st Century Conservation Challenge
This landscape of change presents a new set of nature conservation challenges for the National Trust. To succeed we will need to...
- continue to move beyond our organisational legacy of excellence in conserving ‘islands’ or ‘hot spots’ of biodiversity. We will need to become world leaders in actively supporting the functional and dynamic environmental systems and networks in which the special places for which we care are located.
- continue to build wider partnerships for nature conservation to increase our capability and effectiveness.
- adopt a broader set of conservation strategic tools within the National Trust – in particular, carefully considering the effectiveness of acquisition as a tool for nature conservation versus other options to secure conservation outcomes.
- focus increasingly on the significance of genetic adaptation and adaptability in our approach to conservation of plant and animal species.
- continue to positively engage with emerging technologies, achieving a careful balance between harnessing bio and nano innovations which support environmental conservation benefits, and being rigorous in understanding the full range of potential risks.
- finding ways to engage people and strengthen public support for a philosophy of nature conservation as embracing change (and an endeavour which is now as much about creation as well as restoration of nature’s capital)
- better recognise the environmental disparities between different parts of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

We have of course been aware of many of the growing challenges ahead and have been evolving our approach for some time. In many places the National Trust has already put a ‘beyond our boundaries’ philosophy for nature conservation productively to work. So the arguments above are not necessarily new. But it is clear that we will need to dramatically evolve our approach in the years ahead if we are to successfully face the longer-term challenges for nature which we can anticipate today.