8. Improving global food systems

Question 1

Structure of the lecture?

Answer 1

1. The past of global food systems
2. The present of global food systems
3. Measuring the impact of food
4. Solutions to the global food challenge

Question 2

When did hominins began to transform land?

1.1

Answer 2

Around 100,00 ya

The Neumark-Nord site is around 125,000 years old, and shows evidence of burning from hunter-gatherer populations, and the increase prevalence of herbaceous edible plants and herbaceous mammals

Question 3

When/How did humans began seriously agriculturing?

1.2

Answer 3

Around the last glacial maximum, human fires had reduced European forest cover by 30%. This was modelled by studying ash coverage over Europe by Kaplan et al., 2016

Question 4

What have been the two major agricultural revolutions?

1.3

Answer 4

Neolithic Revolution: 10,000 years ago. Saw transformation from hunter-gatherer to sedentary lifestyle

Industrial Revolution: 200 years ago. Came alongside introduction of engine and Haber-Bosch process

Question 5

Stats on how agriculture is now the largest terrestrial biome

2.1

Answer 5

Goldewijk et al., 2024
Urban areas occupy 2% of the globe
Cropland occupies 22% of the globe
Pastures/Ranglenads occupy another 32%

Over 1/2 of all available land on Earth has been transformed for agriculture

Question 6

How is agriculture actually causing environmental damage?

2.1

Answer 6

Release of ~1.6 trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere

Use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides led to soil damage

Increasing deforestation and monoculture leading to habitat loss and deforestation

Dysregulation of water, nitrogen and phosphate cycles

Question 7

How is the need for agriculture predicted to increase?

2.3

Answer 7

1. Increasing human population size (predicted to be around 9-10 billion by 2050)
2. Increasing daily calorie intake (predicted to be around ~3400 daily kcal by 2050)
3. Decreasing availability for land due to increasing towns and cities

Question 8

What are the three main mechanisms we can use to assess the environmental impact of food?

3

Answer 8

1. Direct measurements
2. Life-Cycle Assessments (LCAs)
3. Systems Modelling

Question 9

How can we use direct measurement to model the environmental impacts of food?

3.1

Answer 9

1. Measuring emissions of different compounds in agricultural landscapes (i.e., using pheromone traps to understand insect abundance and biomass)
2. Estimating greenhouse gas emissions by measuring a variety of different factors. This is highly variable.

Question 10

How can we use Life-Cycle Assessments (LCAs) to assess the environmental impact of food systems?

3.2

Answer 10

LCAs allow for the full assessment of the supply chain of a product, farm or country across multiple environmental indicators.

They are important for assessing the overall impact of an entire product, including everything from transport to packaging

Uses metrics like greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, land-use, water-use, pesticides, toxicity etc.,

Different products show high variability, but we can see strong patterns between different groups (i.e., chickpeas are better than steaks)

Poore and Nemecek, 2018

Question 11

How can we use systems modelling to understand the environmental impacts of food systems?

3.3

Answer 11

A dynamic method that is useful for forecasting future scenarios, and how exogenous factors (like climate change) affect food

Question 12

Why is it important to quantify the environmental impacts of food?

3.4

Answer 12

Understanding leads to the improvement of our food systems. This allows different products, packaging, transport systsems to improve

Understand the impacts of different countries

Understanding the impacts of different companies

Allows for informed individual, community-level, corporate and governmental choices

Question 13

Why is it important to incorporate ethics, values, social sciences, traditional knowledge etc., to our understanding of food systems?

3.5

Answer 13

Justifying prioritising certain environmental issues over others (i.e., climate change over soil health?)

Understanding the trade-offs between environmental and social issues (i.e., if we use homegrown products, then farmers will suffer)

Limits on science for quantifying environmental impacts (i.e., sometimes we need to trust indigenous and traditional knowledge, since science is always limited)

Impacts on local communities

Question 14

What are th 5 major solutions we have to reduce the impact of food?

4.1

Answer 14

1. Preventing conversion of land to farms
2. Enabling and incestivising farmers to quantify their LCAs
3. Encouraging dietary changes
4. Reduction in food waste
5. Scaling up novel technologies, particularly in low-resstance markets

Question 15

How can we prevent land conversion to farms?

4.1

Answer 15

Policy and law mostly
Improvement of plant efficiency (i.e., CAM photosynthesis)

e.g., the EU’s new ban on importing deforestation-linked products

Question 16

How does encouraging farmers to quantify their life-cycle impacts improve global food systems?

4.2

Answer 16

Returning autonomy to farmers, and providing them with the knowledge and incentives to control their own environmental impacts

Important for understanding the nuances of different farms, crops, methods etc.,

Question 17

How can we promote diet change to reduce impact of food?

4.3

Answer 17

Methods such as informational campaigns, taxes on environmental impacts of food, fundamenta shifts in environmental awareness, changes in the ‘default’ options

Plant-based diets can reduce individual emissions by 28%, and total global land use by 3.1 billion hectares

Question 18

How can we reduce food waste to improve environmental impact of food?

4.4

Answer 18

Mostly required at the level of large global corporations

Question 19

How can we use novel technologies to improve environmental impact of food?

4.5

Answer 19

example: 90% of global vanilla production is derived from fossil fuels, but if we didn’t use this, then we would require a country the size of romania to produce natural vanilla.

Can we find a non-fossil fuel alternative?