'How to feed the world without it costing the Earth'

How we choose to deal with rising human food demand will to a large degree determine the state of biodiversity and the wider environment in the 21st century. After briefly setting out recent work examining two routes to reducing demand – making better use of food waste, and lowering meat consumption - the rest of Andrew's talk will focus on two contrasting supply-side approaches to meeting remaining demand at least cost to nature: land sharing, in which farmland is made as friendly to wildlife as possible, albeit at the cost of lower yields; and land sparing, in which space for nature on unfarmed land is maximised by farming elsewhere at high yields.

Andrew graduated from Clare in 1985 and is Professor of Conservation Science in the Department of Zoology and a Professorial Fellow. He works primarily on how to reconcile biodiversity conservation with meeting human food and other needs, and on the costs and benefits of conservation. Andrew works closely with colleagues in other disciplines, including economics and psychology, and recently co-founded the Cambridge Centre for Carbon Economics.