In defence of inclusive society

Image: Esthee2010, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Shonil Bhagwat (@shonilbhagwat)

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Madhav Gadgil: Champion of the Ecosystem People

Gadgil at Kasargod, Kerala, India in December 2013 (Source: Wikimedia Commons) Professor Madhav Gadgil passed away earlier this week, on 7th January 2026. My newsfeed all week was full of heartfelt obituaries written by friends and colleagues. He was an inspiration to the ecologists of my generation. I had the privilege of working with him in the late 1990s at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and a year spent in his company has shaped how I think about nature and culture.

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COP30: glass half empty or half full? A month has passed since the closing ceremony of COP30. As I watched the ceremony on the 22nd of November 2025, on my computer screen and from the comfort of my…...

COP30: glass half empty or half full? A month has passed since the closing ceremony of COP30. As I watched the ceremony on the 22nd of November 2025, on my computer screen and from the comfort of my ...

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COP30 From the Global South

Video of the full panel discussion is now available. So, why COP30 from the Global South? The discussions and decisions in the 30 COPs so far have largely been dominated by the Global North. There is a building sense of disappointment with these discussions in the Global South. Hence, this focus on the Global South to rectify that. According to UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Global South broadly comprises Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia (excluding Israel, Japan, and South Korea), and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand).

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Why is Indigenous knowledge important for the conservation of biodiversity?

Re-blogged from Relational Thinking – The People and Nature Blog In this blog post Shonil Bhagwat, a professor at The Open University, discusses their highlights of the Research Article they …

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How can we make our food systems better?

The answer to this question is the 'Four Betters' framework put forward by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (#FAO). These four betters are: Better Production, Better Nutrition, Better Environment and Better Life. But what do these Four Betters actually mean in practice? That was the question that the Foods Futures event on the #WorldFoodDay on 16th October 2025 - FAO's 80th birthday - set out to answer.

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FAO celebrates its 80th birthday this week on World Food Day!

🥗 To celebrate this landmark birthday of an iconic institution, I am looking forward to taking part in this event on Thursday, 16th October to explore the #future of #food and #agriculture through the lens of #FAO's #4Betters. 🌾 Ever since the 1996 World Food Summit ( availability, access, utilisation, and stability are thought of as the four pillars of…

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When does militarised conservation work?

Hello from Italy! What if I told you that armed soldiers are involved in safeguarding forests and protecting wildlife - not in the Serengeti National Park in Africa, not in Sariska Tiger Reserve in India, but in Southern Europe?! Yes, you heard that right, in Southern Europe, in Italy to be precise. I had never thought that militarised conservation exists anywhere in the Global North, let alone in Europe, until I went to a conference last week on the topic of old growth forests and ancient trees.

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Project BEYOND – Broadening the engagement of young people in environmental science

Every heard of the ‘leaky pipeline’? NO, don’t worry, I am not complaining about British Gas or Thames Water, and there is no burst boiler at home, luckily! Leaky pipeline is a phrase that describes the loss of talented individuals with a lot of potential from certain professions. And environmental professions, sadly, are full of leaky pipes, which desperately need fixing!

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How might our personal health and planetary health be connected?

Do you ever get that gut feeling about something? What if I told you that there is more to that feeling than meets the eye, or rather brain. There is actually a direct connection between our gut and our brain. A nerve called the Vagus nerve carries the signals between the two. Even more astonishingly, there are molecules, typically protein molecules that our body produces, which are able to cross the so-called blood-brain barrier.

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Decolonising knowledge: What can we learn from cricket?

Five years ago The Guardian reported that only one in five UK universities were 'decolonising' their curriculum. Today, almost every department in almost every university is decolonising their curriculum. For me, decolonisation of knowledge is a no-brainer! There are many different knowledge systems consisting of Indigenous knowledge, local knowledge and traditional knowledge, and that variety is necessary to make sense of the world we live in today.

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Seeds for tomorrow

Njung'e Wanjiru's brilliant artwork produced at the ‘Seeds 4 Tomorrow’ workshop in Cambridge - - takes you on a journey through a corn field and shows why we need crop diversity. The Seeds 4 Tomorrow workshop convened by Franziska Fischer, Maysoun Mustafa, Matthew Davies and colleagues at the Archaeology Department in Cambridge set out to develop a community of practice (

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