Sometime in the 1990s, nature conservation organisations began to get serious about livelihoods. The basic idea was that if people living near protected areas (or other important places for wildlife) gain a good income from natural resources, they would place a higher value on the ecosystem, and therefore conserve it. This logic has spawned a […]
Defra have published the final reports of a third round of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) pilot studies – one of which was delivered by 3Keel in partnership with the Woodland Trust. The aim of these pilots was to continue the progress made in developing Defra’s understanding of PES markets. These pilot bids sought to […]
Exactly a decade ago I got my first job in the agri-food sector as a farm conservation advisor. A typical day saw me surveying farm habitats and helping land managers integrate biodiversity into their day-to-day business practices – nearly always financed by EU agri-environment schemes (AESs) or charitable trusts. Public sector and NGO expenditure on […]
Over the last 9 months, 3Keel and WRAP – along with partners at Dragon Rouge and ETANTE – have been researching and writing on the challenges and opportunities facing the food system over the next ten years. We’ve done a heap of research and, with the help from a Thought Leadership Group drawn from WRAP’s network, […]
Effective biodiversity conservation and development planning depends on the ability to map and collect data on the location of important resources, otherwise known as spatial data. Collaboration across organizations to share spatial data can have vast benefits for efficient planning and coordinated decision-making across a landscape. However, governments, ministries, and business do not often share […]
Our previous blog in this series questioned the idea of the ‘global food system’ and suggested that we might more productively secure our future food supplies by focussing on the relationships between particular urban and particular rural areas: the city/region food system. This time we delve into the links between cities and their surrounding rural […]
How we’re going to ‘feed the 9 billion’ has become one of the existential questions of recent years, alongside, and linked to, other threats to human wellbeing: climate change, planetary boundaries, and so on. Food security, like other high-risk threats, has been framed as a global challenge. But is a global lens the best approach […]
Thomas Hughes is a PhD researcher at Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences, who has recently completed a 3 month internship with 3Keel. His research is focused on improving future rice yields. In this blog he outlines the challenge. Rice is arguably the world’s most important crop, as virtually all is used directly for human consumption, often […]
3Keel Partner Tom Curtis was asked to pen a few thoughts on what Oxford’s food system might look like in 50 years. His musing were published this week in the University of Oxford alumni magazine ‘Oxford Today‘. ‘In 2065, Oxford takes fewer chances with its food supply. The first half of the century saw some […]
The notion of ‘landscape’ thinking is gaining momentum, promising a more sustainable future. But what does this mean in practice, and more importantly, what mechanisms exist for achieving resilient outcomes from our natural resources? On April 17th, 3Keel convened a roundtable event to investigate the question ‘Who shapes the landscape and why does it matter?’— […]
