A committee of MPs has lambasted the UK government's approach to nature, saying it is failing to stem huge losses of plants and species. Their report says that the UK has the lowest remaining levels of biodiversity among the world's richer nations.

The MPs say the government spends far more on exploiting the natural environment than it does conserving it. They're calling for legally binding targets for nature similar to the UK's climate laws.

The UK public should be urged by the government to protect the climate by eating less meat and dairy produce, advisers say.

Cattle are a major source of planet-heating gases, but ministers fear a backlash if they ask people to cut down on steak. But the Climate Change Committee (CCC) says people should reduce meat-eating for their health, as well as for the planet.

It says the issue's one of many failings of a government which is delivering only a fifth of its pledges on climate change. People should be asked to eat 20% less meat and dairy produce by 2030, and 35% less by 2050, the CCC insists.

The prime minister has set out plans to cement the UK's place as a "science superpower". Boris Johnson announced how increases in the research budget would be spent.

He will chair a new National Science and Technology Council to provide "strategic direction" on how research is harnessed for the "public good". And Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser to the government, will lead a new Office for Science and Technology Strategy.

Westminster’s efforts to identify post-Brexit business opportunities have concluded that the UK should embrace gene edited crops now it is no longer party to the European Union's limitations on biotech.

The proposal was one of 120 recommendations contained in a report issued by Prime Minister Johnson's Task Force on Innovation Growth and Regulatory Reform (TIGRR), which argued that Brexit offered a ‘one-off opportunity’ to develop new domestic regulations to 'boost productivity, encourage competition and stimulate innovation'.

TIGRR's report has been welcomed by the chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Science and Technology in Agriculture, Julian Sturdy MP, who said it was a 'major step forward' in liberating the UK’s strengths in agricultural science and innovation.

Switzerland has rejected proposals that would have made it the first European country to ban the use of synthetic pesticides in agriculture. The provisional results of a nationwide referendum on Sunday (13 June) revealed that 60.6% of voters rejected proposals to outlaw artificial pesticides.

The initiative – For a Switzerland free from synthetic pesticides – was launched by Future 3, a citizens’ group led by a vinter and a soil biology professor from Neuchatel University. It had sought a domestic ban within 10 years, and a ban on imports of food crops grown using such pesticides.

Space technology has helped create a new interactive map breaking down agricultural land use in Scotland. Crops in every field farmed have been recorded by satellite imagery from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Copernicus Satellite Programme.

The Scottish Crop Map uses data from 2019 to predict the crop types using radar images and to recognise the crops growing in nearly 400,000 fields in Scotland. The map has been developed by the Scottish government working in collaboration with EDINA at the University of Edinburgh.

Scientists have refined a transformational process that allows nitrate to be captured from drinking water for use in agriculture as a liquid fertiliser.

The NTPlus project, focuses on how nitrates can be efficiently removed from drinking water for use as a resource, rather than disposal as a waste.

In doing so, this can decrease agriculture’s dependence on the carbon-intensive Haber-Bosch and Mannheim fertiliser manufacturing processes.

A new project is looking at how machine learning could help predict the intakes of dairy cows - a key research objective for many years.

Scientists in the UK are examining a 'precision feeding' approach for dairy cows as part of a new machine learning project.

Being able to improve the accuracy to predict the intakes of dairy cows, either for the whole herd or for individual cows, has been a key research objective for years.

Leading scientific experts are calling for governments around the world to come together and fund a new international research platform, to reduce the impact of major wheat pathogens and improve global food security.

The John Innes Centre is calling for an internationally coordinated approach to deliver a new ‘R-Gene Atlas’, which would help identify new genetic solutions conferring disease resistance for crops that could be bred into commercial wheat varieties.

Globally, we lose one fifth of the projected wheat yield annually to pests and pathogens totalling losses of 209 million tonnes, worth £22 billion, according to JIC.

The government has today responded to its consultation on the future bovine TB (bTB) strategy and confirmed it will no longer license new intensive badger culls after 2022, alongside shortening and restricting supplementary badger cull licensing.

The NFU does not support the measures because it goes against the science and evidence, which shows badger culling is an effective measure to control the spread of bTB, alongside other controls.