Round-up – February 2025
This is our round-up for February 2025. Please note that this page is not updated, so deadlines may have passed and links may no longer work. To receive future newsletters, please join our network.
News
Big Tent 2025
11 and 12 March 2025
The annual meeting of the Network, this year’s event is fully booked. If you have a ticket and now can’t make it, please email contact@agrifood4netzero.net. We have people waiting for tickets. If you missed out, you can still register and join the waiting list. There has been some turnover of tickets, so it is still possible you might get a space. More on this year’s event.
Webinar: Why carbon markets aren’t a good model for investing in nature recovery
Friday 28th February 2025, 9:00 – 10:00am
Oxford University economist Alex Teytelboym will set out a new approach to scaling investment in nature recovery. At a time of urgent need for private finance to pick up the heavy lifting in nature recovery, Alex will explain why existing market designs such as carbon and biodiversity net gain are not sufficient to scale investment in nature, and use an innovative case study to demonstrate how a different, auction based approach, could scale and enable investment. Alex will be in conversation with Emily Norton, AFN Network+ Policy Champion, and natural capital markets expert.
Webinar: Climate Change Committee 7th Carbon Budget – Hear straight from the committee
This webinar has been rearranged from 3rd March to April. Specific date tbc – look out for an email with a sign-up link from Jez.
Catch up: How prepared is the UK public for a shock to the food system?
Catch up with all our resources around Tim Lang’s recent report for the National Preparedness Commission. Watch the webinar, Civil food resilience and UK preparedness for food system shocks, or read the briefing based on the webinar. Read our digest of his report, Just in Case: 7 steps to narrow the UK civil food resilience gap, or the report itself.
Defra Land Use Consultation
Defra has launched a consultation on the Government’s vision for land use in England and how to deliver it. The consultation will inform the development of a Land Use Framework.
Closing date: 25 April 2025
Women in Innovation Award Winners
Innovate UK has announced the 50 winners of this year’s Women in Innovation Awards, tackling critical social, environmental and economic challenges. Each winner receives a £75,000 grant, personalised business coaching, and access to networking, role modelling and training opportunities. Among the winners are several in the agri-food sector, including:
- Alicja Dzieciol – Developing sustainable peat-free solutions for growers
- Dini McGrath – Helping food manufacturers track and redistribute surplus ingredients
- Jane Pearce – Recovering phosphate from water treatment and enabling its reuse on land.
- Monica Saavedra – Developing innovative light-manipulating materials to increase food production in greenhouses
Vacancies
Funded PhD, Harper Adams University
A fully funded PhD (for students from the UK or Ireland). The project uses mixed methods involving farmers and Teagasc advisors to expedite the meaningful and impactful use of carbon farming measures through a more nuanced understanding of farmer behaviour.
Deadline: 19 March 2025
Funded PhD, University of Southampton
This project aims to develop the lens of resilient industrial socio-metabolic relations – a conceptual framework that moves beyond functional understandings of inputs and outputs, to integrate lived experiences of benefits and harms – through an empirical focus on the nutri- and pharma- ceutical components of the UK chicken meat industry. The PhD studentship will study this complexity to understand their form, the trade-offs that emerge and their impacts on human health, more-than-human communities and ecologies.
Deadline: 15 March 2025
Events
BES Symposium 2025: Nature, Farming and Food: How we value our land
19–20 June 2025, University of Oxford
Evidence and data about what we eat, where and how it’s grown are some of the most contested scientific debates in the public sphere. This year’s British Ecological Society Symposium will tackle the debates and their politics head-on. It will ask how claims made about the impact of food on land and ecosystems differ when voiced by farmers, corporations or ecologists, and ask how we can work together to create the best evidence. The call for presentations is open until the end of March.
Next issue
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