Climate Change, Food Forest, Human Health, Nature Based Solutions, Planetary Health

Food Forests: Growing Food, Restoring Nature

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(Available in English and Dutch).

Can we grow our food and support planetary health at the same time?

Food forests suggest we can. Planted in layers like a natural woodland – but filled with edible trees, shrubs, and herbs – they produce food while enriching the soil, supporting wildlife, and offering resilience against a changing climate.

This book brings together scientific evidence and hands-on practice. The first part reviews what research shows about food forests: from traditional knowledge to their effects on biodiversity, climate, and human health – exploring the debate over non-native species and how wild animals use plants to heal themselves.

The second part belongs to the growers: twelve practitioners across four continents share their journeys of designing, planting, and living with a food forest, from the first failures to the first real harvest.

Interviews with: Wouter van Eck, Geert Jan Nieboer, Laura Nieboer, Simon Verboom, Wytze Walstra, Marieke Karssen, Martin Crawford, Mark Shepard, Roland van Reenen, Ranil Senanayake, Henry Herbert, and Paul Burgers.

Essential reading for growers, researchers, and anyone thinking about the future of our food.

Order a copy here or via your (online or local) book shop.

Planetary Health

Rights for Nature: A Path to Healthier Ecosystems?

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Can granting legal rights to nature actually make ecosystems healthier? Around the world, rivers, forests, and other natural systems are increasingly being recognized as rights-bearing entities. This paper examines what that shift means in practice, drawing on examples from countries including Ecuador, Colombia, New Zealand, Spain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, and the Netherlands.

Rights of Nature can strengthen legal protection, give ecosystems a formal voice in decision-making, improve coordination between institutions, and encourage earlier action when environmental harm is possible. However, the available evidence is still too limited to conclude that legal recognition on its own leads to measurable ecological recovery.

The paper argues that the real impact depends on what happens after rights are recognized. Strong institutions, effective guardianship, adequate resources, clear implementation, accountability, and cooperation across different levels of government are all essential. In other words, giving nature rights may create important opportunities for change, but those rights only become meaningful when they are translated into everyday governance and practical ecological protection – while remaining aware of the limits of trying to represent nature through systems designed by humans.

Read the full paper: Martens, P., Venhof, V., van der Meer, M., & Robbers, R. (2026). Do Rights of Nature Lead to Healthier Ecosystems? Governance, Planetary Health, and the Boundaries of Legal Reform. Challenges, 17(4), 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/challe17040036

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Ecotourism, Integrated Assessment, Sustainable Development

Ecotourism and Community Empowerment

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A typical shaiqiu (晒秋) scene, with crops such as chili peppers and corn displayed in round bamboo trays on drying racks. Shaiqiu is a distinctive cultural landscape feature of Huangling and the wider Wuyuan area.

Ecotourism is often promoted as a way to support rural development by creating new livelihood opportunities, improving local environments, and strengthening appreciation for cultural heritage. However, our recent study of four ecotourism communities in Wuyuan, China, shows that these benefits do not automatically lead to stronger or more empowered communities.

The research highlights the importance of governance. Community empowerment is stronger when local residents are able to participate in decision-making, take an active role in managing tourism activities, and share fairly in the economic benefits. When decision-making remains concentrated among governments, companies, or external experts, residents may have fewer opportunities to influence how tourism develops and can feel less ownership over projects.

The study therefore shows that sustainable ecotourism is about more than attracting visitors or generating income. Long-term success also depends on creating structures that allow local communities to remain involved after projects have been launched. Clear responsibilities, meaningful participation, transparent benefit-sharing, and respect for local culture can help turn tourism benefits into lasting community empowerment.

Read the full paper: Liu, H., Wan, Z., Yu, Y., Melchior, M., Beumer, C., Martens, P., & Rao, M. (2026).  How Do Governance Arrangements Shape Community Empowerment in Rural Ecotourism? Evidence From Wuyuan, China. Sustainable Development,  e71673.  https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.71673.

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Biodiversity, Human Health, Planetary Health, Sustainable Development

Could GLP-1 Drugs Have an Environmental Upside?

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GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy are best known for their effects on diabetes, weight loss and appetite. But their impact may extend beyond human health. By reducing how much people eat, widespread use of these medicines could also lower demand for food — and with it, some of the environmental pressures associated with food production.

Our recent analysis explores a scenario in which 100 million people use GLP-1 drugs and consume around 500 fewer calories per day. We estimate this could reduce annual food-related emissions by roughly 34.5 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent, spare about 70,000 km² of agricultural land, and substantially reduce water use and nutrient pollution.

These benefits are not guaranteed. Farmers and food producers may respond in different ways, and reduced demand does not automatically mean land will be restored for nature. Still, the study highlights an intriguing connection: changes in human metabolism and eating behaviour can ripple through entire food systems and ecosystems.

In other words, medicines designed to improve human health may also have unexpected consequences for planetary health.

Read the full paper: O’Bryan, C.J., Szczepanik, M., Martens, P., J.W.H Yong & De Vos, P. (2026). Appetite-suppressing drugs and emerging
implications for sustainability. npj Sustainable Agriculture,  4, 71 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44264-026-00186-1

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Climate Change

How Far Is It From Low-Carbon Awareness To a Low-Carbon Life?

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Awareness of climate change in China is rising. Living low-carbon is another matter. In a new paper in Heliyon, Yan Wu, Thomas Krafft and I look at the distance between the two.

The study draws on 36 in-depth interviews with people involved in China’s low-carbon city transition: government officials, journalists, company managers, professors, NGO staff and residents. The interviews were held in 2022 and 2023, with field observations in Beijing, Nanjing, Suzhou and Hohhot.

Four things stand out.

  • Awareness is growing. More frequent extreme weather and the national dual-carbon goals have pushed low-carbon thinking into many sectors.
  • Most people pick up their knowledge from short videos and advertisements on social media. Algorithms decide who sees what. The message stays shallow.
  • Many people still see climate change as someone else’s problem. It does not feel like a threat to their health or their income. That is the main barrier between knowing and doing.
  • Rewards and penalties can shift behaviour. But they only work with sound policy and real cooperation between stakeholders.

Some people already live low-carbon lives without ever using the term. Older people, and residents of less developed regions, are frugal out of habit or culture. Labeling these communities as “low-carbon” doesn’t help much. What really matters is respecting their way of life.

Read the full paper: Wu, Y., Martens, P., and Thomas Krafft (2026). From low-carbon awareness to low-carbon lifestyles: How far do we still need to go? A stakeholder-based analysis of low-carbon city transitions in China. Heliyon, 12 (14), e45344, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45344.

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Gezondheid, Klimaatverandering, Wetenschap

Van Toekomstbeelden naar Concrete Actie

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In ons onderzoeksproject MANTRA laten we zien hoe inwoners van een plattelandsgemeenschap samen met onderzoekers een gezonde en klimaatbestendige leefomgeving vormgeven. Met creatieve, toekomstgerichte visualisaties en Living Labs vertalen deelnemers de complexe uitdaging van klimaatverandering naar haalbare, lokale acties.

Deze aanpak leidt niet alleen tot een gedeelde visie, maar ook tot concrete initiatieven, zoals zelfvoorzienende biologische tuinen, ontmoetingsplekken en samenwerking met regionale partners. Het onderzoek laat zien dat verbeeldingskracht en burgerparticipatie krachtige aanjagers zijn van maatschappelijke verandering.

Lees hier het volledig artikel:
Mogendorff, K.G., Van Gestel, E.C.E., Engbersen, D., Nagelhout, G.E., Martens, P. and Visser, B. (2026). Futuring health environments: From citizens’ visual utopias to prototypes. Proceedings of Science, 524. https://doi.org/10.22323/1.524.0015

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Biodiversity

The Bird Sounds That Are Lost

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Singing Yellow Bunting Photographer: Henk Wiebe van der Meulen

This week the Guardian reconstructed the dawn chorus of 1976 Britain to make audible how many songbirds we have lost in fifty years, back when tens of millions more were still in full voice.

Science has a name for this. In 1995 Daniel Pauly called this the shifting baseline syndrome: a psychological and sociological phenomenon where each new generation accepts progressively degraded environmental conditions as the “normal” state of nature . My baseline sits lower than my parents’, and I never noticed, because I calibrate on what I know. My children’s is lower again. The same applies for bird sounds.

This year we installed passive acoustic monitoring in our food forest Vuurpad: recorders that capture sound continuously, with BirdNET (a neural network trained on thousands of species) for identification. The next step is a reconstruction reaching back to 1968, my birth year. It is not a recording, but a back-projection. The audio is derived entirely from (part of) my own original recordings, and it very likely underestimates the richness of he sounds that were to be heard in 1968.

An illustrative 1968–2026 soundscape transition created solely from recordings at food forest Vuurpad. The earlier sections contain more overlapping layers, informed by documented long-term declines in bird abundance, but no external species recordings were added.

Dutch farmland-bird populations have fallen by more than 70% since 1960, driven mainly by agricultural intensification and the loss of hedges and other small landscape features. The skylark was still among the country’s most widespread and abundant farmland breeders around 1975, then declined sharply. For the farmland–woodland edge here in South Limburg, the historical soundscape could plausibly have carried a far stronger presence of farmland and hedgerow birds such as skylark, yellowhammer and tree sparrow. The positive news is that local restoration and less intensive management can produce strong, site-specific recoveries as well.

interdisciplinary, Science

The Whole Is More Than We Thought: Revisiting a Forgotten Big Idea

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In 1926, a South African statesman named Jan Smuts published a bold theory about how the universe works. He called it holism, and while the word has since been hijacked by wellness culture, the original idea was serious science, a century ahead of its time.

Smuts noticed something that bothered him about mainstream science: it was very good at taking things apart, but struggled to explain how complex, organised things came together in the first place. How does a handful of atoms become a living cell? How does a cell become a mind? His answer: nature has a built-in tendency to form wholes – integrated structures that are genuinely more than the sum of their parts, not just in a poetic sense, but causally.

In other words, evolution isn’t only driven by random variation and natural selection. Something in the fabric of nature, Smuts argued, actively channels matter and energy toward organised, structured forms.

For most of the twentieth century, this sounded too mystical to take seriously. But here’s what’s changed: science now has the mathematical tools to ask Smuts’ question properly. Fields like dynamical systems theory and complexity science have shown how order genuinely does emerge from simpler components, and researchers are increasingly asking whether nature might be biased toward organisation, not just accidentally compatible with it.

As the hundredth anniversary of Smuts’ book arrives, his core question looks less like speculation and more like one of the deepest unsolved problems in science: why does the universe keep building increasingly complex, integrated structures, and is there a law behind it?

Read the full paper: Dos Santos, M., Weyers, P.J. & Martens, P. (2026). Holism at One Hundred: Jan Smuts, evolution, and the dynamics of organisation. Nature Africa, https://doi.org/10.1038/d44148-026-00101-3

Climate Change, Education

From Information To Engagement In The Anthropocene: The Role Of The Media

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Urban areas, with dense populations and concentrated consumption, are major contributors to CO₂ emissions, accelerating the progression of the Anthropocene. In this context, low-carbon city transformation is essential for sustainability and climate resilience. This transformation is a complex process requiring collaboration across sectors and stakeholders, with media serving as a crucial communication bridge connecting government, the public, and other actors. This study uses in-depth interviews combined with systems thinking and transdisciplinary insights to analyze media coverage and its role in China’s low-carbon city transition. Based on our research on how media shapes low-carbon city transitions, there are three key takeaways:

  1. Awareness without depth: Coverage is growing, but most reporting stays surface-level. Too few trained climate journalists and over-reliance on official press releases means complex phenomena rarely get proper scientific explanation.
  2. Format shapes influence: Video and animation are most effective at reaching the public. But in-depth written reports are what actually influence policy decisions and industrial transformation.
  3. Media as social bridge: Beyond informing, media facilitates the dialogue needed for coordinated action across government, business, NGOs and citizens. Sustained coverage can shift social norms, but climate anxiety, misinformation, and algorithmic filtering all erode trust and engagement.

The study is China-focused, but these dynamics – shallow coverage, format-dependent influence, and the tension between awareness and action- are recognizable across many countries with mixed public/commercial media, limited climate journalism training, and top-down environmental governance.

Read the full paper: Wu, Y., Martens, P. and Krafft, T. (2026) From information to engagement in the Anthropocene: media’s role in low-carbon city transformation in China. Frontiers in Climate. 8:1735834. https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2026.1735834

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