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Fishmeal and oil derived from forage fish are critical vulnerabilities for stable aquaculture feed supply. A shortfall impact model and scenario analysis explores options for bridging forage fish deficits with alternative aquaculture feeds.
Consensus exists on the urgent need for food systems to be more sustainable, but defining their environmentally safe operating space is challenging. This study proposes food system boundaries as a share of planetary boundaries, defining budgets across nine boundaries and revealing where boundary transgression is most critical.
Most studies assessing food self-sufficiency look at calories and neglect nutrient gaps. Comparing food demand and potential food production under land and water constraints, this study quantifies 9 key nutrient gaps for each of African’s 54 countries.
Brazil is known to supply an important share of China’s increasing demand for proteins, but the exact pressure on land and water that results from this is unclear. This study addresses this gap, focusing on soybean trade, showing the persistence of indirect deforestation associated with soy cultivation expansion.
Data from the Illuminating Hidden Harvests initiative challenge the small- versus large-scale fisheries dichotomy, identifying five global archetypes to guide targeted policy and food systems transformation.
Drought stress threatens global food security. This study shows that drought-induced changes in wheat metabolites selectively enrich drought-tolerant bacteria in the rhizosphere, which enhance plant growth through key functional traits, offering promising avenues to strengthen crop resilience and sustain food production under climate change.
Renewable-fuelled plant factories (RFPFs) offer great promise for resilient food production. This study presents a multidimensional geospatial analysis to devise RFPF deployment schemes that aim to meet the population’s dietary vegetable demand in China’s 369 city-level regions.
Research on sustainable diets has primarily focused on human and planetary health, neglecting workers in food value chains. This study quantifies the risk of forced labour embedded in five different diets in the USA, underscoring the need to integrate such risk in sustainable diet transition efforts.
Reduced dependence on wild-caught fish in favour of crop-based ingredients for feeds has supported aquaculture growth. An analysis of ingredient origins versus feed composition shows that origin must be considered to assess the environmental footprint of feed production.
Using the most recent Spatial Production Allocation Model 2020 crop data, agricultural green and blue water consumption is estimated. Water use increased by up to four-fifths for major crops in the past two decades.
This study uses remote sensing and meteorological observations to assess the impact of the 2015 drought on rice in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and in the Republic of Korea. The results show how energy shortages, intensified by trade sanctions, reduced irrigation capacity and led to crop yield loss.
The traditional structural transformation narrative emphasizes intersectoral labour reallocation out of agriculture. This study presents ten stylized facts about how employment and compensation evolve within agrifood value chains amid structural transformation, offering insights into post-farmgate dynamics and gender pay inequality.
What we eat, as well as where and how it is grown, impacts species extinction risks through agricultural land use. Using a new global biodiversity impact data product, this study estimates how many species extinctions may potentially be caused by the production and consumption of different food types on a country-by-country basis.
A scenario analysis and integrated environmental–economic model demonstrate that repurposing food waste and food processing by-products for animal feed has asymmetric effects on food security and environment sustainability.
Increasing the consumption of specific food groups will be key for human health but might also lead to environmental impact. This study compares the biodiversity pressures associated with fruits and vegetables consumed in the United Kingdom, India and South Africa.
An analysis of the EPIC study demonstrates that dietary plant biodiversity presents benefits for human and planetary health, but adverse environmental impacts are associated with dietary animal species richness.
This study evaluates nitrogen surplus reduction scenarios across Europe using century-long sub-national data and a multidimensional clustering algorithm. The findings show that a 20% fertilizer reduction alone is insufficient to meet Farm to Fork targets and that region-specific strategies, combined with advances in technology and management practices, are essential.
Menu manipulation is a promising strategy to increase environmental and health benefits of food choices. Drawing on data from a UK university residence, this study illustrates such potential.
