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Gene drives are a promising means of malaria control with the potential to cause sustained reductions in transmission. In real environments, however, their impacts will depend on local ecological and epidemiological factors. We develop a data-driven model to investigate the impacts of gene drives that causes vector population suppression. We simulate gene drive releases in sixteen ~ 12,000 km 2 areas of west Africa that span variation in vector ecology and malaria prevalence, and estimate reductions in vector abundance, malaria prevalence and clinical cases. Average reductions in vector abundance ranged from 71.6-98.4% across areas, while impacts on malaria depended strongly on which vector species were targeted. When other new interventions including RTS,S vaccination and pyrethroid-PBO bednets were in place, at least 60% more clinical cases were averted when gene drives were added, demonstrating the benefits of integrated interventions. Our results show that different strategies for gene drive implementation may be required across different African settings., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The vast majority of the food we eat comes from land-based agriculture, but recent technological advances in agriculture and food technology offer the prospect of producing food using substantially less or even virtually no land. For example, indoor vertical farming can achieve very high yields of certain crops with a very small area footprint, and some foods can be synthesized from inorganic precursors in industrial facilities. Animal-based foods require substantial land per unit of protein or per calorie and switching to alternatives could reduce demand for some types of agricultural land. Plant-based meat substitutes and those produced through fermentation are widely available and becoming more sophisticated while in the future cellular agricultural may become technically and economical viable at scale. We review the state of play of these potentially disruptive technologies and explore how they may interact with other factors, both endogenous and exogenous to the food system, to affect future demand for land., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Approximately a third of all annual greenhouse gas emissions globally are directly or indirectly associated with the food system, and over a half of these are linked to livestock production. In temperate oceanic regions, such as the UK, most meat and dairy is produced in extensive systems based on pasture. There is much interest in the extent to which such grassland may be able to sequester and store more carbon to partially or completely mitigate other greenhouse gas emissions in the system. However, answering this question is difficult due to context-specificity and a complex and sometimes inconsistent evidence base. This paper describes a project that set out to summarize the natural science evidence base relevant to grassland management, grazing livestock and soil carbon storage potential in as policy-neutral terms as possible. It is based on expert appraisal of a systematically assembled evidence base, followed by a wide stakeholders engagement. A series of evidence statements (in the appendix of this paper) are listed and categorized according to the nature of the underlying information, and an annotated bibliography is provided in the electronic supplementary material.