Project description
Tracing the environmental footprint of food production
Food production is vital for humanity but drives extensive environmental damage. Over the past 60 years, rapid and uneven development has strained planetary boundaries. Despite advancements, early impacts before 1961 remain poorly quantified. In response, the ERC-funded WHEP project will address this by tracing the environmental footprint of food and linking it to human nutrition since 1850. It aims to quantify impacts, analyse trade’s role and assess inequalities. WHEP’s objectives include creating a global database, estimating environmental impacts, tracing product footprint in trade chains, and analysing trajectories within the safe and just operating space. This research promises to unveil the history of food’s environmental impact, paving the way for fair and sustainable policies.
Objective
Food production covers the most basic human need, and simultaneously is the main driver of anthropogenic environmental impacts. These impacts have resulted in the transgression, during the brief period since the industrial revolution, of the planetary boundaries defining the safe operating space of humanity. A rich research literature quantifies the last 60 years’ fast, heterogeneous, and often unfair development in food supply and related environmental impacts, and how these depend on agro-climatic factors, technology, and trade flows, all of which have greatly changed but with different trajectories around the world. However, these developments lack an integrated approach, and are very poorly quantified before 1961. WHEP will bridge these knowledge gaps, assessing “who has eaten the planet” by answering the questions: “What are the environmental impacts of food production since 1850?”, “What is the role of trade in food supply and in displacing the responsibilities for these impacts?” “How are impacts related to planetary boundaries, food supply and inequality?” These highly ambitious goals are addressed by four objectives: 1) Constructing a consolidated global country-level annual database on agricultural production and management, using massive data collation in combination with modelling; 2) Estimating the environmental impacts: greenhouse gas emissions and carbon, land, water, nitrogen, and phosphorus through spatially explicit, integrated, dynamic modelling; 3) Calculating product footprints and tracing them along international trade chains; and 4) Analyzing the observed trajectories in the safe and just operating space, by assessing the drivers, and how impacts at the production and consumption levels are related to fair and healthy supply. This ground-breaking research will shed new light on the environmental history of food, opening up many new research frontiers, and providing necessary information to design fair and sustainable policies.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
28006 Madrid
Spain