Dr James Kirwan, together with Bill Slee and Carolyn Foster (both formerly of the CCRI), completed an analysis of the potential role of new food supply chains in sustainable rural development during the period 2003 to 2006, as part of…
A recent field trip along the Lower Severn Vale with a group of Landscape and Applied Ecology MSc students highlighted some of the opportunities and challenges associated with weaning ourselves off large-scale and centralised electricity generating systems. The area of interest is part of the Severn estuary between Gloucester and the old suspension bridge carrying the M48 from Aust to Chepstow.
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.
Social research project conducting primary research with animal keepers and vets to provide evidence on the impact of current exotic disease compensation policy on animal keeper behaviour.
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”