Nutritional combined environmental impact assessment of global food systems

Abstract

Food production and consumption are responsible for remarkable environmental burdens including greenhouse gas emissions, land expansion, water stress, and pollution due to the nutrient overflow of the fertilizer application. Meanwhile, current global food systems are unable to address hunger and malnutrition in different forms occurring in many regions and populations. The world needs a food system transformation to ensure that we operate within planetary limits and at the same time feed the growing population with healthy diets. Previous studies investigating food systems often focus on the impact of diets on a single environmental domain and consider limited nutritional factors like calorie, protein or a couple of other nutrients. Integrating multiple environmental and nutritional aspects into the assessment of country-specific food systems at a global scale is needed to examine the potential trade-offs and account for the heterogeneity of food consumption and production patterns across regions. Focusing on what is produced, eaten, and wasted, the thesis employs the nutritional combined environmental impact assessment approach with multiple indicators to explore the sustainability opportunities in the food systems of all countries at national and global scales. This thesis first reviewed the existing evidence on how the global dietary changes can contribute towards the progress on individual United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It showed the existing shortcomings and necessary dietary changes required in different world regions. This is followed by an analysis of Swiss dietary patterns and the implications on human health, nutrition quality, environmental sustainability, economic costs under different scenarios using multiple indicators. The thesis then examines the food waste in each country to explicitly present the embedded nutritional and environmental losses. Lastly, domestic food production profiles of world countries are analyzed to identify the gaps and surplus in terms of 25 nutritional indicators and highlight the gaps between production and requirement of different nutrients in each country that can guide nutrition- sensitive food production and supply chain policies. Results from the thesis show that strategies like shifting towards sustainable healthy diets meeting nutritional recommendations, addressing nutrient production inadequacy, and reducing waste can enable the food sector to contribute massively towards the global and national SDGs. This thesis provides relevant insights on dietary options, global hotspots of specific food groups and regions in terms of food wasting, and domestic nutrient-sensitive production priorities. Food waste reduction and more nutrition-sensitive food production can support the realization of a diet that meets the need for adequate nutrient intakes while ensuring the operation of food systems is within environmental planetary boundaries. Overall, this thesis attempts to capture the performance of food consumption and production and identify the improvement opportunities as well as the associated impacts for different countries. The results are expected to support different stakeholders in evidence-based decision-making and monitor the effect of interventions. Future efforts on filling the data gaps identified in this thesis and extending the proposed nutritional combined environmental impact assessment framework with more environmental, economic, and social sustainability indicators are need of hour to improve our understanding of global food systems and achieve progress on SDGs.