Sustainable and healthy food solutions: system dynamics and trade-offs

Project Information

FLORA

Grant agreement ID: 101039402

DOI

10.3030/101039402

EC signature date 21 September 2022

Start date 1 October 2022

End date 30 September 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 495 428,00

EU contribution

€ 1 495 428,00

Coordinated by

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FLORA (Sustainable and healthy food solutions: system dynamics and trade-offs)

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Food systems are crucial to end hunger, but also to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to protect and restore biodiversity, to ensure human health and well-being, to end poverty, and to support sustainable communities. While hunger has receded, food systems are causing increasingly severe damage to our environment and health.

The FLORA project (“Sustainable and healthy food solutions: system dynamics and trade-offs”) will contribute to a transformation of global agri-food production, trade, and consumption necessary to achieve sustainable and healthy food systems.

The project will create essential evidence to identify and implement the shifts in practices and behaviours needed to effectively achieve this transformation, by:
• making a diagnosis of the integrated health and environmental outcomes of food systems globally, from the production and consumption perspectives, with innovative measures of sustainability,
• identifying key threats and opportunities with system dynamics and complex network analyses
• targeting and evaluating tailored solutions with an interdisciplinary modelling framework.

The project will enable the identification of most effective, targeted solutions by considering trade-offs, synergies, and dynamics of key food systems components. Global in scope, it sets the ambitious goal to overcome barriers in current approaches by taking a systemic approach and establishing a robust, interdisciplinary framework supported by empirical advancements to tackle complex food systems challenges.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the first two years of the project, the FLORA project team, including the PI Carole DALIN, Ph.D. candidate Belén Benitez, and postdoctoral researcher Marcellin Guilbert, was created. The team worked together with collaborators at University College London and others by collecting, processing and integrating secondary agro-environmental data with global biophysical model outputs to achieve the project’s objectives. Most activities have focused on the carbon footprint of global food systems associated with land cover change on the one hand, and on the wider environmental impacts of global food systems on the other hand.

The main achievements resulting from the project first two years include the following scientific publications:

The 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: facing record-breaking threats from delayed action
Romanello M, ... C Dalin, et al. The Lancet 2024, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(24)01822-1

Impacts of global food supply on biodiversity via land use and climate change
Boakes EH, C Dalin, A Etard, T Newbold
Nature Communications 2024, doi:10.1038/s41467-024-49999-z

International food trade contributes to dietary risks and mortality at global, regional and national levels
Springmann M, H Kennard, C Dalin, F Freund
Nature Food 2023, doi:10.1038/s43016-023-00852-4

PLANTdex: An index to assess the multi-dimensional environmental impact of global crop commodities
Jwaideh M and C Dalin (in review with Nature Sustainability) Research Square link: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3139724/v1

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Scientific publications resulting from the FLORA have advanced the research field beyond the state of the art in several ways.

For example, the paper by Boakes et al. (Impacts of global food supply on biodiversity via land use and climate change Nature Communications 2024, doi:10.1038/s41467-024-49999-z) has advanced the field of biodiversity impacts in supply chain by developing a new indicator for biodiversity loss associated with land use food commodity production, as well as also including indirect impacts via climate changed due to agricultural GHG emissions.

Besides, the paper by Jwaideh et al. (PLANTdex: An index to assess the multi-dimensional environmental impact of global crop commodities
(in review with Nature Sustainability) https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3139724/v1) has made first strides towards key goals of the project, by doing the first integration of four key impacts of agriculture on the environment in terms of sustainability.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the consumption of agricultural products, globally from 1995 to 2021.