Research needs for a food system transition

Abstract

The global food system, and animal agriculture in particular, is a major and growing contributor to climate change, land system change, biodiversity loss, water consumption and contamination, and environmental pollution. The copious production and consumption of animal products are also contributing to increasingly negative public health outcomes, particularly in wealthy and rapidly industrializing countries, and result in the slaughter of trillions of animals each year. These impacts are motivating calls for reduced reliance on animal-based products and increased use of replacement plant-based products. However, our understanding of how the production and consumption of animal products, as well as plant-based alternatives, interact with important dimensions of human and environment systems is incomplete across space and time. This inhibits comprehensively envisioning global and regional food system transitions and planning to manage the costs and synergies thereof. We therefore propose a cross-disciplinary research agenda on future target-based scenarios for food system transformation that has at its core three main activities: (1) data collection and analysis at the intersection of animal agriculture, the environment, and societal well-being, (2) the construction of target-based scenarios for animal products informed by these new data and empirical understandings, and (3) the evaluation of impacts, unintended consequences, co-benefits, and trade-offs of these target-based scenarios to help inform decision-making.

Keywords: Animal agriculture; Plant based; Scenarios.

Fig. 1

Reprinted from O’Neill et al. (2020). Radiative forcing scenarios (per the Representative Concentration Pathways of GHG emissions) are shown on the y-axis. Each column represents a different SSP—scenarios of socio-economic development, inclusive of energy and land use pathways among other sectors, from sustainability to fossil-fueled development and several intermediate/alternative trajectories. Pink shading indicates unlikely combinations, while the blue or green colors indicate the number of sectoral impact applications (i.e., studies/analyses out of 1370 reviewed by O’Neill et al. (2020)), e.g., agriculture, water, public health, biodiversity, and resources use and availability, that have used a particular SSP-RCP combination or overall SSP, respectively. White indicates that these scenarios have not been used in any known studies/applications

Fig. 2

Illustrative depiction of idealized food system scenarios with respect to global cattle meat production, as an example. Corresponding scenarios would exist for other animal products’ production (and consumption), as well as plant-based alternative products. “Historical” shows actual cattle meat production (from 1980) based on world aggregated UN FAO statistics. The black dashed lines represent a possible period of transition for implementation and scaling of production of alternatives, and colors represent possible future pathways of production, ranging from “Business as Usual” (BAU, red) to peak and declining production (green)