Professor Stephen Morse

The integration of palaeolimnology into conservation practice is crucial for effective ecosystem management and restoration. Palaeoecological data provide a unique long-term perspective on key ecological challenges and enable decision makers to better understand pre-disturbance conditions, natural system dynamism and responses to change. Despite this there exist well-recognised accessibility issues and a clear research-implementation gap, in particular, poor communication and lack of understanding of conservation practitioners’ constraints. This study evaluates the accessibility and value of palaeolimnological research to conservation practice by interrogating 60 key applied research papers identified via a rigorous pre-screening process to ensure relevance. The papers were assessed on the use of best practice accessibility criteria, from knowledge-exchange literature, and conservation-practitioner feedback was gathered on the value of conservation recommendations made within the papers. Despite widespread recognition of the importance of accessible research, our review reveals that essential accessibility criteria are inconsistently applied. Although there has been an increase in accessibility practices over time, co-production practices (including co-authorship, co-design of research, and linkage to relevant environmental legislation), showed no significant increase, despite being advocated for by the research community. Practitioner review highlighted the need for research to provide clear, actionable recommendations, and papers that detailed specific management or restoration guidance were particularly well-received, as were those that considered financial implications and summarised their findings more clearly. Equally, many papers were criticised for overly technical language and poor expression, generic suggestions, and a lack of practical consideration in their recommendations. The study highlights the importance of improving accessibility and co-production of knowledge to ensure that research outputs are accessible, relevant, and feasible to guide conservation efforts. To enhance the relevance and impact of applied palaeolimnology, we propose five key recommendations: (1) situate recommendations within existing practice and knowledge; (2) consider the practicalities for practitioners, including material and socio-economic aspects; (3) use clear and simple language; (4) employ easy-to-interpret diagrams and bullet points for recommendations; and (5) improve accessibility of older work. These recommendations are key in helping palaeolimnology progress towards a ‘gold standard’ of applied research, where it can be employed to greater effect to support conservation practice.

This review paper focuses on the development and application of the Sustainable Livelihood Approach (SLA), especially regarding its limitations, both in terms of its formulation and link to theory as well as practice. The SLA has proved to be a popular approach, not least because it is holistic and ‘people-centered’, and forces a requirement that livelihoods, along with their vulnerability and institutional contexts, are well understood before interventions are designed and implemented to help the community. However, its theoretical underpinning has been questioned, and some have pointed to the weak representation of important dimensions such as power, including its link to globalization, and culture, with the latter including faith. This paper explores the various ways that these issues have been addressed by using faith as a lens, and makes a case for a ‘Sustainable Living Approach’ (SLivA) to provide a stronger dovetailing with the capabilities/functionings approach of Amartya Sen. However, there is a trade-off between the complexity of frameworks and their practicability, and more work is needed in this area, especially in terms of the potential contribution of technologies such as very-high-resolution Earth Observation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

The UK government is seeking new food trade partners post-Brexit, with a focus on international meat trade to ensure supply chain stability while minimizing economic, environmental, and social damages. A UK Meat Trade-centred World Input-Output Model (UK-MTWIO) is developed with an innovative RAS method to assess the multiple impacts of different meat import scenarios. The results highlight the interdependence of meat types within the UK agricultural sector and the effects on other countries. Environmentally, most scenarios show the potential for reducing GHG emissions in the global agricultural sector. As for animal welfare, the UK can get higher animal welfare performance under beef import scenarios but suffer animal welfare losses with other scenarios. These findings underscore the intricate relationship between environmental, economic, and animal welfare impacts of global food trade. Policymakers should take a comprehensive approach and collaborate with all trading partners toward a more ethical and sustainable future.

There is a recognised role for the integration of palaeoecological data into conservation management, but its application remains hampered by a disconnect between academics and practitioners. We co-produced a palaeoecological investigation with conservation practitioners at an internationally important lowland heathland in the UK, to highlight the value of synergistic working between researchers and managers. We used a multi-proxy approach to reconstruct the site's ecological history over the past c.200 years, focusing on changes in vegetation, hydrology, and fire regimes, and translated the results into accessible visual and spatial formats to support management decisions. Our results reveal significant ecological changes, particularly a post-1950 shift from diverse wetland habitats to a drier, Birch-dominated landscape, linked to increased wildfire frequency and site acidification, as well as the decline of several conservation priority species. The spatial analysis highlights the need to consider site-specific heterogeneity in conservation planning. The management recommendations arising from the improved understanding of historical ecological conditions are focused on rare species conservation, increasing natural variability and the value of a rewetting programme to enhance resilience to climate change. The study highlights the value of a palaeoecological perspective for informing contemporary conservation management; in particular regarding in-site spatial considerations when making recommendations, as well as illustrating the importance of effective communication between researchers and land managers.

Purpose
There are increasing concerns regarding detrimental health effects of added sugar in food and drink products. Non-nutritive sweeteners (NNS) and sweetness enhancers (SE) are seen as viable alternatives. Much work has been done on health and safety of NNS&SE when consumed in place of sugar, but very little on their sustainability. This work aims to bridge that gap with an environmental study of replacing added sugar with NNS&SE in the context of drink and yoghurt.

Methods
A life cycle assessment (LCA) approach was used to compare environmental impact of a drink and yoghurt, sweetened with sucrose, to those sweetened with NNSs or an SE: stevia rebaudioside A, sucralose, aspartame, neotame, and thaumatin. Primary ingredients data were taken from preparation of foodstuffs for clinical trials. Results are reported via the ReCiPe 2016 (H) method, with focus on land use, global warming potential (GWP), marine eutrophication, mineral resource scarcity, and water consumption. Impacts are reported in terms of 1 kg product. Scenarios explore sensitivity of the LCA results to change in background processes, functional unit, and sweetener type. This research was conducted as part of the EU Horizon 2020 project SWEET (sweeteners and sweetness enhancers: impact on health, obesity, safety, and sustainability).

Results and discussion
Replacing sugar with an NNS or part-replacing with an SE is shown to reduce environmental impact across most impact categories, for example, on a mass basis, GWP for a drink reduces from 0.61 to approx. 0.51 kgCO2-eq/kg and for a yoghurt from 4.15 to approx. 3.73 kgCO2-eq/kg. Variability in environmental impact is shown to be relatively small between the NNSs, indicating that choice of NNS is less important than the reformulation changes required to accommodate the loss of sugar. Reporting impact in terms of calorie density, instead of mass, shows greater reduction in environmental impact when using an NNS or SE and shows how important functional unit is when reporting impact of these products.

Conclusion
This study is the first to compare food or drink products sweetened with sugar, NNS, or SE. Results show that there is great potential to reduce environmental impact of sweetened drinks and yoghurts. Moreover, the choice of NNS does not greatly affect the environmental impact of either product. Therefore, this research shows that choices relating to replacing added sugar may be based more upon health or formulation needs and less on environmental concerns.

This review paper takes as its starting point a number of intriguing conundrums. Firstly, there is much interest in the research community in the assessment of happiness as a part of sustainability, including the development of indicators and indices, although it is often acknowledged that quantifying something as subjective as happiness is a challenge.Secondly, despite this compelling and oft-repeated case, the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator framework has just one mention of ‘happiness’ in all the 267 indicator metadata documents. While ‘sustainable happiness’ is often stated as a desired outcome of the SDGs, it seems that happiness has not been regarded as part of the ongoing assessment process. The review answers the question as to why that should be so. The methodology is
founded on a review of the existing literature on SDG indicators and happiness, especially the insights gained from established examples of happiness indices, such as the Gross National Happiness Index (GNHI) of Bhutan and the Happy Planet Index (HPI), as well as other initiatives to create such indices in parallel to the SDGs, such as the ‘SDGs for Happiness’ and the ‘SustainableWellbeing Index’. Given that indicators and indices are typically intended to attract attention from the media, the paper explores the reporting of various happiness indices in one form of media—newspapers. One would expect that happiness indicators and indices would have an attraction for journalists, but do they? The review concludes that the complexity of measuring happiness on top of a ‘quagmire’ (as some authors put it) of quantification challenges with the SDG indicators seems the most likely explanation for its absence to date. But with experience gained by 2030, maybe there will be an opportunity to consider the inclusion of happiness, drawing insights in particular from the GNHI and HPI, for a successor SDG indicator framework.

Pension funds are the largest combined institutional investors in the world. The integration of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) criteria into defined contribution (DC) pension investments by pension funds can result in sustainable pensions that are in line with pension beneficiary preferences and help achieve Sustainable Development Goals. In many cases, ESG investment choice decisions are taken on behalf of pension beneficiaries. This raises important questions such as whether pension beneficiary and pension fund and asset manager investment decisions align on ESG and remuneration preferences and what is the impact of any mismatch? To answer these questions, this research sets out to analyse pension beneficiary ESG voting preferences on ESG polls presented to them. The results suggest that there are differences between the pension beneficiary ESG preferences and those recommended. Pension beneficiaries are vocal in wishing to influence their pension investments; shareholder activism is evident; however, management recommendations dominate.

This paper explores the relationships between indicators designed to assess the quality of natural habitats, the quality of governance, and self-reported well-being (often equated with ‘happiness’) at the country scale. A habitat/species ‘protection’ group of indicators was identified comprising the Terrestrial Biome Protection based on national weights (TBN), the Species Protection Index (SPI), and the Protected Area Representativeness Index (PAR), all of which require identification, demarcation, management, and protection of habitats and species, typically backed up with legislation, by government. This group of ‘protection’ indicators had a statistically significant and positive relationship with both the quality of governance and happiness (p < 0.05). However, it is suggested that the positive impact of this group of indicators on happiness is indirect; a better quality of governance has a positive influence on both this group of ‘protection’ indicators and happiness. A fourth indicator, the Species Habitat Index (SHI), differs from the other three in that it assesses the proportion of suitable habitats for a country’s species that remain intact relative to a baseline year, and this is not necessarily tied solely to protected areas and thus to government intervention. The SHI had no statistically significant association with the quality of governance and had a negative association with happiness (p < 0.001). It is suggested that the SHI may be conceptualized as an inverse indicator of perceived ‘development’; lower SHI values equate to greater pressures on land use for housing, farming, and industry, among others, and all of these can be seen by at least some people as positive and thus improve their sense of happiness. This paper makes suggestions for future research in this important nexus for sustainability of environment, governance, and happiness.

CONTEXT
Scoping or initial life cycle assessments (LCAs) occur in the absence of conformity to existing standards and often contend with limited data. This is particularly the case for agricultural food value chains. Nonetheless, such studies can play a valuable role in delivering policy-relevant insights and serving as a precursor for a more complete analysis. However, in practice, such studies may be conducted within the framing of larger projects and be undertaken by subject specialists rather than LCA practitioners.
OBJECTIVE
This study seeks to bridge a gap in the literature to provide practical guidance on methodological pitfalls that may complicate the development of initial LCAs to the point of a minimal viable product (i.e., usable insights or a functioning platform for a more targeted analysis). In this case, our ideal target audience is subject specialists in the agri-food sector, but not necessarily LCA practitioners.
METHODS
This study undertook a structured review of some of the requirements of LCA through the lens of the stages of an LCA and framed by considerations of what a minimum viable product needs. This was supported by the generation of illustrative (plant and animal-based) LCA results produced as part of a commodity ‘food basket’. While these terminate at the farm gate based on UK conditions, another illustrative comparison (UK and Spanish tomatoes) is compared up to a substitutable point along the value chain, i.e., a UK distribution centre.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
Within this work, proposed minimum data requirements are presented along with results for several case studies demonstrating important environmental hotspots. The results demonstrate the importance of interpreting impact hotspots, showing how most commodities will demonstrate life cycle stages that are significant for most environmental impact categories, but not all. For example, in the case of glasshouse-produced tomatoes and broiler chickens, the production of heat and feed is seen as crucial for many impact categories such as Global Warming Potential (GWP), whereas field/farm-based leachate and litter management dominate eutrophication and acidification impacts. Taking a reflective approach, the potential sources of error in developing the exemplar case studies are discussed along with strategies for addressing these.
SIGNIFICANCE
There remains a clear need to formulate practical guidance and recommendations for conducting an initial LCA, highlighting crucial data needs and potential strategies to overcome identified barriers. This paper has shared perspectives on conducting a transparent and reliable scoping study, identifying potential data gaps, limitations, and the complex nature of agricultural value chains, using representative case studies which can be used to further develop more insightful LCAs.