Ambitious food system interventions required to mitigate the risk of exceeding Earth’s environmental limits

Michalis Hadjikakou , Nicholas Bowles, Ozge Geyik, Sjaak Conijn, Jose Mogollon, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, Adrian Muller, Isabelle Weindl, Enayat A. Moallemi , M. Abdullah Shaikh, Kerstin Damerau, Kyle Frankel Davis, Stephan Pfister, Marco Springmann, Michael Clark, Genevieve Metson, Elin Röös, Bojana Bajzelj, Neal Graham, Dominik Wisser, Jonathan Doelman , Michaela Theurl, Prajal Pradhan, Miodrag Stevanovic, Christian Lauk, Jinfeng Chang, Vera Heck, Ertug Ercin, Liqing Peng, Nathaniel Springer, Lex Bouwman, Tiago Morais, Hugo Valin, Daniel Mason D'Croz, Karl-Heinz Erb, Alexander Popp, Mario Herrero, Patrice Dumas, Xin Zhang, Timothy Searchinger, Brett A. Bryan

Transforming the global food system is necessary to avoid exceeding the Earth’s environmental limits. A robust evidence base is crucial to assess the scale and combination of interventions required for a sustainable transformation. We developed a risk assessment framework, underpinned by an evidence synthesis of global food system modeling studies, to quantify the potential of individual and combined interventions to mitigate the risk of exceeding global environmental limits for agricultural area, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, surface water flows, and nutrient cycles by 2050. GHG emissions and nutrient cycles are the most difficult thresholds to avoid exceeding, and are conditional on shifts towards diets with a low proportion of animal-source foods, steep reductions in emissions intensity, substantial improvements in nutrient management, feed conversion ratios and crop yields, and efforts to limit overconsumption and food waste. Ambitious actions across the global food system are required to ensure the required level of risk mitigation.