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An elusive shoebill, a Yellowstone grizzly and spawning red snappers are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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Cap on sulphur content of marine fuels worldwide will save millions of lives in the coming decades, say campaigners. BusinessGreen reports

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) agreed on Thursday to set a cap on the sulphur content of marine fuels, in a move that campaigners predict will save millions of lives in the coming decades.

At a meeting of the IMO’s environment protection committee this week shipping officials agreed to cap the sulphur content of marine fuels sold around the world at 0.5% by 2020, finally making good on a 2008 agreement to cap sulphur levels by 2020 or 2025.

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A landmark international agreement will create the world’s largest marine park in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean, an environment home to most of the world’s penguins and whales. More than 1.5m sq km of the Ross Sea around Antarctica will be protected under the deal which was brokered in Australia between 24 countries and the European Union

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Common agricultural policy money given to estates in England, including one owned by the Duke of Westminster, Britain’s richest landowner

England’s vast grouse shooting estates receive millions of pounds in public subsidies according to an investigation by Friends of the Earth.

Thirty of the estates received £4m of taxpayer’s money between them in 2014, the year examined by the pressure group, including one owned by the Duke of Westminster, the richest landowner in Britain with land holdings estimated to be worth £9bn

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Australian government 'Grow your own' campaign billboard, 1943. NAA C2829/2

During the devastating floods that hit Queensland in 2011, Brisbane and regional centres came perilously close to running out of fresh food. With the central Rocklea produce market underwater, panic-buying soon set in and supermarket shelves emptied fast.

Such events expose the vulnerability of our urban food systems. Climate change and resource depletion present more slow-burning challenges, but the fact remains that urban food policy is at risk of complacency.

Gardening is certainly good for you, but does it have a role to play in increasing urban food security and resilience? Perhaps history can tell us the answer.

While Australian research has focused on recent urban agriculture initiatives, a real-world experiment in gardening for food security took place in Australia more than 70 years ago, during the Second World War.

Winning the war with home-grown food

Britain, facing serious food shortages, began using the slogan “Dig for Victory” in 1939. In Australia, low-key efforts at encouraging home food production began two years later.

A 1941 survey of Melbourne households revealed that 48% of them already produced food of some kind. In spacious middle-ring suburbs the proportion was as high as 88%, whereas in the dense inner cities it was less than 15%. Food production was most common among middle-class and skilled working-class households, and less so among the poor and marginalised.

By 1943, significant food shortfalls were expected in Australia. The government responded with a range of measures, including a large-scale “Grow Your Own” campaign.

Movies, radio broadcasts, public demonstrations, competitions, posters, newspaper ads and brochures all urged home gardeners to grow their own vegetables. It was hoped this would reduce the strain on the commercial food supply, as well as offering substitutes for rationed food items, providing insurance against commercial food supply failures, and easing the demand on items such as fuel and rubber. Municipal councils and schools also ran vegetable production programmes.

A ‘Grow Your Own’ campaign advertisement from around 1943. PROV, VPRS 10163/P2

While there are no reliable statistics on the campaign’s effectiveness, anecdotal evidence suggests that home food production increased – but not without hitting obstacles along the way.

Wartime disruptions led to shortages of pesticides, seeds, rubber and fertilisers. Livestock and fowl can play an important role in nutrient cycling in sustainable food production, but cows and goats had been excluded from many urban areas in the decades before the war. As a result, competition for local manure was fierce; some gardeners would wait with bucket and shovel for horses on grocery rounds to pass by.

Artificial fertilisers were also expensive and hard to come by. Even the use of blood and bone as an organic fertiliser was restricted, as it was diverted for commercial poultry and pig feed. Alternatives included composting of waste, although this required time and skill, and its nutritional value for plants was limited.

Labour, too, was in short supply. Many able-bodied people had joined the armed forces and others were working long hours in war jobs. This left relatively few urban residents with the time and energy to devote to a vegetable garden. The Women’s Land Army was involved in some urban cultivation, and the YWCA established a “Garden Army” of women who established and tended community gardens on private or public land.

Lessons from the past

What lessons can we learn from this history about the capacity for suburban food production to boost urban food supply in a time of prolonged scarcity?

The most important is that home and community food gardens can contribute meaningfully to resilient urban food systems, but as our urban form is changing we need to explicitly plan for this contribution.

For example, vegetable gardens need space – public or private – that is reasonably open and not crowded by trees. This is one reason why the spacious middle-ring suburbs of Melbourne were more productive than the inner city in 1941.

Sustainable urban food production also requires skill, knowledge and time. Much food gardening today relies heavily on purchased seedlings, manures and pesticides. Resilient food gardens need to have a range of strategies for sourcing essential inputs locally, for example through seed saving networks, composting, local livestock and fowl, and on-site rainwater collection and storage. They also need people with the time and skills to manage these systems.

Vegetable gardening needs skill and knowledge PROV, VPRS 10163/P2

This history also provides inspiration in the form of stories of self-provisioning by everyday people, such as the 56-year-old woman running a habadashery and confectionery store who in 1941 produced all the vegetables and eggs she and her sister required at their Essendon home.

The low-density form of much of Australia’s urban landscape provides considerable potential for sustainable and resilient food production. But our cities still need to invest in developing the skills and systems to sustain this kind of farming.

This is especially critical for low-income areas where resource scarcity will bite hardest. It is also a task that looks ever more challenging as farms are pushed further from the city, while standard homes on shrinking lot sizes and poorly designed infill development eat up urban garden space.

We may not yet be at the stage of needing a nationwide “Grow Your Own” campaign on the scale seen during wartime. But if we want to increase our cities’ resilience and sustainability, we would be foolish to ignore its lessons.

Andrea Gaynor receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Odell, Bedfordshire An ape-like shuffle brings me under coppiced hazel bushes to a string of pale, sunlit fungi, their fresh young caps wrinkled like old skin

A thousand or more years ago there were blue harvests in the fields around Odell. The village was named after the plants that produced the vivid dye beloved of ancient Britons, though, over time, the Saxon’s Woad Hill contracted into its modern form.

Today the fields grow no woad, but harvests of a different sort can be found on the clay cap on top of the hill, where the great wood still stands.

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Protests against the controversial Dakota Access pipeline move into a new phase when police in North Dakota make mass arrests and deploy pepper spray against protesters and the media. Activists say tear gas was also used, claims the county sheriff denies

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An increase in the coal price and Turnbull’s apparent change of view means the Coal Wars are BACK. Re-arm yourself the facts.

The extraordinary resistance to coal seam gas in NSW documented by The Bentley Effect underlines the power of community energy, and delivers a warning to politicians and big business about their energy and business choices. The power is shifting to communities.

SAPN's appeal to recover another $250m in network costs rejected by the Australian Competition Tribunal. But is this a win for consumers?

BluGlass in major fund-raising after completing first stage of review of its ground-breaking technology that could make LEDs cheaper to make.

Tesla to unveil integrated solar roofing line, alongside Powerwall and Powerpack 2.0, the next step in Musk's dream of 100% renewables. Here's what we know about these new products ...

Podcast: ITK interviewed Mick McCormack, CEO of APA, who discusses prospects for energy infrastructure sector and its growing portfolio of renewable energy investments.

Power Ledger is expanding trials of blockchain-based software to open up peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading behind the meter and across the network.

France faces sky-rocketing power prices and supply shortages with 21 of its 58 nuclear reactors offline due to safety concerns. Just as well it can rely on imports of renewable energy from Germany.

Humans aren't the only musical maestros on the planet.

After years of international negotiations, Ross Sea in Antarctica will become the world's largest marine protected area.

MYSTERY OF THE RINGS: Mapping of gravity data from the Moon by NASA's GRAIL mission may finally reveal how a huge bullseye-shaped basin formed on the Moon, say scientists.

DINO BRAIN: A brown bit of rock picked up in the UK by a professional fossil hunter a decade ago is the first piece of fossilised dinosaur brain tissue ever to be found, scientists have confirmed.

The scientific numbers are not yet in from the UK Butterfly Monitoring scheme, but the Big Butterfly Count recorded its worst figures since it began

At first glance, it has been a bafflingly bad summer for butterflies. After a decent spring in the north-west and a dazzling late summer in the south-east, garden buddleias remained bereft. The only butterfly I’ve seen in good number is the red admiral, which thrived during the second-warmest September on record.

The scientific numbers are not yet in from the UK Butterfly Monitoring scheme (a magnificent dataset collected by 2,000 volunteers each summer which celebrates its 40th birthday this year) but the Big Butterfly Count recorded its worst figures since it began – worse than the washout of 2012.

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