Was down at the @royalsociety.org last night for Andrew Balmford's epic talk "on feeding the world without costing the earth" as the inaugural winner of the RS Environment Medal. Here's my notes on it including that rarest of sightings: Andrew in a suit! anil.recoil.org/notes/ab-rs-... 🌍

The Royal Society Environmental Prize lecture on feeding the world without costing the earth

Notes from Andrew Balmford's Royal Society Environment Medal lecture, on why shifting diets and cutting food waste are necessary but not sufficient, and why sustainable high-yield farming tied to land...

anil.recoil.org

I dropped by Edinburgh for a workshop on 'rewilding the web', with participation from philosophers, technologists, ecologists, architects, mathematicians, authors and landscape planners. anil.recoil.org/notes/rewild... @kathrynnave.eurosky.social @mariafarrell.eurosky.social @robin.berjon.com 🌎

Rewilding the Web: my workshop report from Edinburgh

Notes from a wonderfully interdisciplinary Edinburgh workshop on 'Rewilding the Web', ranging coopetition and biological variety through the philosophy of self-organisation, polycrisis governance, pro...

anil.recoil.org

Some 'behind the scenes' about appearing on the BBC/ITV/etc last week talking about... hedgehogs and AI, of all things. anil.recoil.org/notes/hedgeh... 🌏

What happens when a hedgehog story prickles its way into the BBC

Behind the scenes of a week of BBC/ITV news and radio appearances about hedgehogs and TESSERA, but also what to expect when a research story catches the news cycle.

anil.recoil.org

Congratulations to the EEG group co-leader Srinivasan Keshav on being elected a Fellow of the @royalsociety.org in this year's election! royalsociety.org/news/2026/05...

Exceptional scientists elected as Fellows of the Royal Society | Royal Society

Over 90 outstanding researchers from across the world have this year been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences.

royalsociety.org

The answer isn't to blame the projects, but the market failure racing to the bottom for forestry credits, while direct air capture (with none of the environmental co-benefits) charges 100x more per tonne! 🧪🌍🌐 My thoughts on this at anil.recoil.org/notes/redd-o...

Helping tropical forest protection keep up with a fast-changing world

We analysed 44 REDD+ projects and find that the voluntary market did over-credit, but also that most projects slowed deforestation on the ground. Forest carbon credits are under priced relative to per...

anil.recoil.org

Tropical forests deserve a higher base price for carbon credits, and credible ex-post evaluations are one path to help get there. Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com on learning lessons from past REDD+ over-crediting. 🧪🌍🌐 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Learning lessons from over-crediting to ensure additionality in forest carbon credits - Nature Communications

REDD+ projects reduced deforestation, but less than claimed. Synthesising 44 projects, this study finds about 11 times over-crediting due to selection bias in control areas and modelling approaches an...

nature.com

How we did planetary scale training and inference with AMD and Vultr geotessera.org/blog/2026-03...

Two releases of the TESSERA Embedding Explorer (tee.cl.cam.ac.uk) this week: v3.4 adds manual labelling with pin and polygon tools, per-class similarity sliders, and spatial classifiers. v3.5 adds a multi-user login system to the demo site. geotessera.org/blog#tee-v3....

You can also query our dynamic embeddings coverage viewer and request more for your environmental projects geotessera.org/coverage

TESSERA has a shiny new website up at geotessera.org which you can scroll through to get an introduction to geospatial embeddings! You can try the two global explorers, one hosted (tee.cl.cam.ac.uk) and one that streams purely in-browser using Zarr (tze.geotessera.org)

Last week Frank Feng and I joined Robin Cole on his satellite image deep learning podcast to talk about Tessera: how it works, how it differs from existing models, and our future plans. Thanks for hosting us, Robin! www.satellite-image-deep-learning.com/p/tessera-a-...

Tessera: A Temporal Foundation Model for Earth Observation

with Sadiq Jaffer and Frank Feng

satellite-image-deep-learning.com

It still surprises me you can get good performance with even tiny models on top of TESSERA embeddings. Here's how to find solar farms in the UK with a small ~42k CNN: toao.com/blog/earth-o...

There has been outrage as the @acm.org rolls out AI generated summaries of papers. This is doing AI exactly wrong by replacing valuable, peer-reviewed content with a possibly inaccurate summary. It's still not too late to correct it though and use AI responsibly... anil.recoil.org/notes/acm-ai...

Dear ACM, you're doing AI wrong but you can still get it right

anil.recoil.org

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas here at the EEG!

geotessera 0.7.1 is out to meet all your planetary geospatial hacking needs. It now has an efficient Parquet registry for the 1.2m+ tiles of CC-BY licensed global embeddings, and Zarr format support for more efficient chunking and distributed processing. Enjoy! 🌍 anil.recoil.org/notes/geotes...

GeoTessera 0.7 out with efficient sampling and Zarr support

anil.recoil.org

We're proud to say that Professor Emily Shuckburgh CBE, the Director of ICCS, has been appointed as the UK Government's new Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Emily will remain in her ICCS post while helping the UK to reach #NetZero – bravo!

The UK *really* needs to set up a sovereign tech fund to support the vibrant open source scene here. Kudos to @openuk.bsky.social for pushing this in their recommendations to @ukri.org openuk.uk/theuksfuture...

The UK’s future leadership in open source - OpenUK

Today OpenUK is sharing our first public update on the work we have been commissioned to undertake by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). This was procured through a competitive tendering process, and ...

openuk.uk

Please repost! I am looking for a passionate and hard-working PhD student to work in southern Africa on experimental defaunation and rewilding of megafauna. See the link below for more information: @camzoology.bsky.social @conservation.cam.ac.uk

Part 1 covers the 2nd Programming for the Planet conference (@propl.dev) organised by @kcsrk.info @dorchard.bsky.social and me. There were talks, demos and discussions about what we can do as computer scientists to avert the climate and biodiversity crises anil.recoil.org/notes/icfp25... 🌍

Programming for the Planet at ICFP/SPLASH 2025

anil.recoil.org

A five part roundup of my @icfp-conference.bsky.social experience, covering chairing @propl.dev, holding an OxCaml tutorial, speaking about Docker, and what I learnt from everyone! anil.recoil.org/notes/icfp25; above all, huge thanks to @ilyasergey.bsky.social for making this ICFP/SPLASH so good

A Roundup of ICFP/SPLASH 2025 happenings

anil.recoil.org

Completely full house for our OxCaml tutorial at #icfpsplash25! conf.researchr.org/details/icfp...

The 2nd PROPL is today, and will be livestreaming from www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIRJ... in an hour! Full program here conf.researchr.org/home/icfp-sp... and an overview of the program at dl.acm.org/action/showF...

[ICFP/SPLASH'25] Peony NE - PROPL (Oct 12th)

YouTube video by ACM SIGPLAN

youtube.com

📢 New blog! @charlesemogor.bsky.social uses machine learning to enhance anti-poaching across sub-Saharan Africa. Working with @anil.recoil.org, @fletcherecology.bsky.social and @milindtambe-ai.bsky.social, he is developing models to help rangers patrol effectively. Find out more: bit.ly/4mMs3Av

I've signed an open letter to the UN Article 4.6 supervisory body to not rule out nature from climate action targets anil.recoil.org/notes/do-not...; read the letter here docs.google.com/document/d/1... and sign up here docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... if you agree 🌍

Do not rule out nature from climate action; an open letter

anil.recoil.org

Here's the official report from the NAS now, following my notes a few months ago about our 'big biodiversity meetup' in Washington DC anil.recoil.org/notes/nas-rs...

What I learnt at the National Academy of Sciences US-UK Forum on Biodiversity

anil.recoil.org

National Academy of Sciences@nasonline.org · 11mo ago

How do we measure life on Earth? 🌍🌱 The new summary report from the 2025 US-UK Forum on Measuring Biodiversity, hosted by the NAS and @royalsociety.org, explores tools, challenges, and solutions for tackling the #biodiversity crisis. Read here: bit.ly/460RB7R

How do we measure life on Earth? 🌍🌱 The new summary report from the 2025 US-UK Forum on Measuring Biodiversity, hosted by the NAS and @royalsociety.org, explores tools, challenges, and solutions for tackling the #biodiversity crisis. Read here: bit.ly/460RB7R

As for biodiversity, a brand new study also confirms what's well established: overall ruminant meat, especially from grazing animals (which require more land, entailing more carbon & biodiversity opportunity costs) has the biggest 'extinction footprint' of all foods: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

I also knocked up a fun interactive global explorer where you can check out your favorite country and food choices to compare risks quantifyearth.github.io/food-globe/

Choosing where we source the food that we eat makes a difference to the environment, but how much? After churning through 100s of petabytes of data, we now know the answer varies by three orders of magnitude for species extinction risks! Paper out in Nature Food: www.nature.com/articles/s43... 🌍

New paper on making the Internet more resilient. Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet | Proceedings of the sixth decennial Aarhus conference: Computing X Crisis dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet | Proceedings of the sixth decennial Aarhus conference: Computing X Crisis

dl.acm.org