Volume 3 Issue 5, May 2022

Governing food-system transitions requires innovation in the study of impacts and futures. Current approaches to impact assessment require greater complexity in systems modelling and complementation with alternative mechanisms to overcome limitations in scoping, conceptual assumptions and methodologies.

Pesticide-centred crop protection is highly carbon-intensive, with product synthesis, distribution and field application generating up to 136.6 MtCO₂ equivalent per year. Carbon financing offers an opportunity to bring more natural and sustainable alternatives to scale.

Food price data at the retail level are critical to assessing the impacts of covariate shocks on people’s access to healthy, nutritious diets. Through the calculation of cost and affordability, retail food prices can also help identify entry points to improve food and nutrition security, such as in the context of COVID-19.

Degrowth can aid climate mitigation in the food system by integrating reduced animal protein demand, emissions pricing and wealth redistribution into a global food systems transformation.

Major centres of global food export are not in places where biodiversity is greatest.

Improving manure management can reduce nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions, but its impacts on indirect N₂O emissions and other greenhouse gases need to be assessed. Structural changes that address livestock demands and spatial planning are needed.

Modelling the quantitative effects of sustainable degrowth and efficiency proposals on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, material output and economic activity shows that a combination of both can lead to a sustainable transformation of the food system.

A farmer’s decision whether to use fertilizer is complicated in rainfed areas because the resulting yield gains vary greatly depending on rainfall, temperatures, soil conditions and many other factors. Farmers on about 25% of sub-Saharan Africa’s rainfed maize-growing land face an unacceptably high likelihood that this productivity-enhancing input will not pay off.

Achieving yield gains requires more insights into the deterministic pathways of crop yields. This Perspective proposes a wiring diagram as a platform to integrate knowledge of the interrelationships of physiological traits impacting wheat yield potentials and their interactions with the crop developmental stages that can be used to accelerate genetic gains through breeding.

Price fluctuations associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have been key determinants of food security in the recent past. A comparison of monthly retail prices in 181 countries from January 2019 to June 2021 reveals which regions and food items have been most affected.

The extent to which policy-induced changes in food demand patterns help address environmental and health challenges remains poorly understood. Using a survey-based, randomized controlled experiment with almost 6,000 respondents from the United Kingdom, this study assesses the impacts on food purchases, greenhouse gas emissions and dietary health of applying carbon and/or health taxes, information provision and a combination of both tax and information strategies.

Income reduction in high-income regions is insufficient for mitigating food systems greenhouse gas emissions. A deeper transformation is required that changes consumption patterns and prices emissions.

Food exports impact biodiversity in countries directly involved in trading and beyond. This study calculates food trade flows among high-hotspot, low-hotspot and non-hotspot countries, including high- and low-income ones, over 2000–2018. The amount of land saved through the imports is calculated for 189 food items.

This study explores the magnitude, spatiotemporal variation and drivers of nitrous oxide emissions from Chinese livestock production over the past four decades. Scenario analysis is used to estimate emissions mitigation potential of different measures, their associated marginal abatement costs and the social benefits.

Elimination of hunger will require shifts in crop usage by 2030. Calories will need to be obtained from crops currently harvested for purposes other than direct food consumption. Sub-Saharan Africa, however, will likely fall short even if all harvested calories are used directly as food.

Biochemical reaction networks that characterize living organisms have a universality that enables the prediction of the chemical composition of food. A mathematical rationale is provided here for quantifying nutrient concentrations in food and imputing missing quantities in food composition databases.

Contemporary food scientists may find inspiration, just as, over the centuries, various writers and painters have, in the delicious, multisensory complexity of a ripe peach.