News

Dan Keech is teaching a module called Sustainable Food and Food Security for 25 bachelor students at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, from 26th - 29th April, 2016. This is the third year that Dan has delivered this module, which is part of the University's Environmental Studies course, within the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Dan Keech will be speaking at an conference in Sidmouth, Devon, on 16th April at an event which is being organized by the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, called ‘Orchards in the Landscape’. Dan’s presentation is called ‘New commercial models for old cultural landscapes – orchard conservation in Germany and England’.

Chris Short is hosting a key policy seminar on waste management and the circular economy together with Sue Oppenhiemer, who is a former graduate from the University of Gloucestershire Environment Planning and Management Masters course. The seminar, which is free to attend, is to take place on 29th April at the University of Gloucestershire Park Campus.

A friend and collaborator of the CCRI, Professor Ian Hodge, has just published a book called "The Governance of the Countryside, Property, Planning and Policy" (ISBN: 9780521623964). Ian Hodge is Professor of Rural Economy in the Department of Land Economy and Fellow of Hughes Hall at the University of Cambridge and his book is highly relevant to topics covered in CCRI research, in particular concerning property rights and environmental management and governance.

Paul Courtney is running a workshop on Wednesday, 23rd March, at a seminar organised by the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens. The seminar aims to highlight a new guide to tools for evaluating health and wellbeing outcomes from community growing programmes and aims to share experiences from community growing groups, who are using the tools, together with leading academics in the field

Using findings from an in-depth, large-scale qualitative study with animal keepers and veterinarians, Damian Maye and Rhiannon Naylor have co-authored a paper entitled "The ‘good farmer’: farmer identities and the control of exotic livestock disease in England", which has been accepted for publication in Sociologia Ruralis, which will be published later this year.

George Osborne announced a welcome boost of £700 million funding for flood defences and resilience in his budget yesterday. The CCRI has been actively involved in natural flood management in recent years and hopes that a large part of this new fund will be invested in natural flood defences.

CCRI soil experts, Julie Ingram and Jane Mills, recently co-authored a paper on “Management of agricultural soils for greenhouse gas mitigation: Learning from a case study in NE Spain", which was published in Environmental Science and Policy. This paper has now been made available online. It is based on data collected from the EU FP7 SmartSoil project.

We are delighted to report that a film on natural flood management, which the CCRI helped to make, has won an award. From over 2,200 films, the public had nominated their best films in seven different categories. The winning film is called “Rural Sustainable Drainage – Natural Flood Management in the Stroud Valleys”