The FLORA group, led by Carole Dalin at ENS-PSL will present its work on « Sustainable and healthy food solutions: system dynamics and trade-offs ».

There will be 3 short presentations:

Effect of global diet change on environmental sustainability
by Marcellin Guilbert
By coupling our 2020 assessment of cropland environmental sustainability with an input–output model (essentially a recipe book of global production), we assess how shifts in global diets affect sustainability.

Characterisation of global cropland bright spots
by Jasmine Gamblin
We mapped the distribution of « bright spots » in global agriculture—regions where significant crop production does not exceed local environmental sustainability thresholds. Studying the shared characteristics of these regions using random forest classification highlights the importance of natural habitat around cropland. We thus explore the possibility of extending sustainable regions by rewilding some fraction of cropland, and quantify the associated production loss.

Consumption-based GHG footprint of global food systems (2000–2020)
by Belén Benitez
Food consumption drives environmental pressures by shaping global agricultural production systems and international trade patterns. Developing harmonized frameworks that consistently integrate multiple agricultural GHG emission sources and link them to food consumption through trade is therefore essential for fully assessing the sustainability of the agri-food system. Here we quantify the carbon footprint of food consumption by combining spatially-explicit land use change-related GHG emissions. Results are reported at the global scale across four reference years between 2000 and 2020. By reallocating production-based emissions to final consumers through a consumption-based framework, we link global food demand to the geographic origin of agricultural GHG emissions, thereby enabling an analysis of spatial patterns and temporal trends of the carbon footprint of food demand worldwide

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, and
• 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.

FLORA is funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council and led by Carole Dalin, senior researcher in the Department of Geosciences at ENS-PSL.

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