Reviews & Analysis

Building productive relationships between farmers and scientists is critical to developing new innovation pathways to solve the challenges of contemporary agriculture. On-farm experimentation (OFE) is an effective approach that brings agricultural stakeholders to support farmers’ own management decisions for agricultural innovation, with digitalization playing a key role in motivating and enabling OFE.

An anticipatory life-cycle assessment of industrial-scale ovalbumin production using Trichoderma reesei culture indicates that this cellular agriculture approach could have lower global warming potential than ovalbumin purified from egg whites.

Social disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic triggered highly varied changes in diet and lifestyle. It has offered a unique opportunity to study drivers of behaviour change in the general population, building the crucial evidence base needed to tackle major challenges for transforming food systems.

The merging of small farms into fewer large ones is a key part of China’s food security and rural revitalization strategy. Yet, the benefits of implementing large-scale farms vary under different land consolidation pathways.

Armed conflicts have devastating humanitarian consequences, both direct and indirect. A crucial yet overlooked outcome is the disruption of local agricultural production and the consequent erosion of food security in war-ridden regions.

Unfed bivalve mariculture could fill the gap in demand for nutritious and sustainable seafood. This Review explores the bivalve value chain, examining how improved production practices and food processing could address consumer requirements for increased food safety and greater availability of appealing bivalve food products.

GWP* is an alternative emission metric that better represents the short-lived character of methane, but its application is not straightforward and can have a substantial impact on the design of mitigation policies in agriculture.

Coupling micro- and nanotechnology-based diagnostics devices with machine learning would bring advantages in the food and agriculture sectors that will positively impact our planet.

Addressing trade-offs between the environment, health and inclusion in the quest for sustainable food systems requires integrated and coherent policies. This Perspective proposes a food systems transformation framework that brings these elements together and enables the design of concrete development pathways for food sustainability.

A new dataset that comprises more than 5,500 historical crop pest and disease records in China provides a unique opportunity to understand how climate affects crop pest and disease outbreaks.

Vertical farming systems have the potential to form a part of resilient food systems through the production of reliable, high-quality crops in urban landscapes. This Review explores how multi-layer indoor crop cultivation systems currently operate and the conditions needed to upscale and support their integration into mainstream agriculture.

Developing new modelling tools to support better design of climate change adaptation strategies offers an opportunity to harmonize crop production, climate change mitigation and environmental sustainability.

Global redistribution of accumulated nutrients could enhance food security and counteract degradative Earth system processes. Such a redress of unequal nutrient use may be enabled by a ‘one Earth currency’ allowing accumulated rights to nutrients to be traded.

Sensitivity of US dairy production to extreme cold and heat has diminished over recent decades in large part due to improvements in management, breeding and technology. These adaptations have benefited milk yield by reducing the vulnerability of dairy production to cold and heat stress.

Adopting new models for sustainable and profitable agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa requires a comprehensive evaluation of fertilizer use in terms of agronomic performance, economic implications, the integration of crops and livestock, and policy recommendations.

Projected decreases in maize and soy yields due to global warming are compounded by changing co-variability between surface water fluxes and temperature. Precipitation and evapotranspiration need to be accounted for when adapting agriculture and agricultural practices for climate change.

Corporate reporting tools should incorporate equity considerations if they are to cover the true costs of operating in the food system. Looking at natural, social and human capital costs, this study proposes integrated metrics to account for the impact of economic activities across socio-economic, gender, racial, generational and risk-bearing domains.

Several frameworks aimed at making the effects of food production and consumption on society explicit have emerged recently. This Review identifies the main ones currently in use and compares them in terms of scope, functional unit, impacts and monetization types—with an outlook to their harmonization.

The continued proliferation of certification schemes aimed at mitigating social and environmental problems in the food sector calls for constant stocktaking of their effects. This Review examines some of the most prominent sustainability standards to discuss the issues of causality, exclusion, compliance and monitoring, excess supply and emerging country markets—ultimately identifying directions for future research.

Labour exploitation in the agrifood sector must be addressed for sustainability. Data-driven methodologies can identify risk hotspots and facilitate development of mitigation strategies.