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Food systems have the potential to nurture human health and support environmental sustainability, but it is widely accepted that current patterns of food production threaten both. The EAT-Lancet commission, a group of 37 scientists from across the globe, recently released their scientific review of what constitutes a healthy diet from a sustainable food system, and which actions can support and speed up food system transformation.
The commission's healthy diet proposals are inspiring policy recommendations providing baseline scenarios for the eradication of undernourishment and malnutrition. While healthy diets have known co-benefits of reducing the environmental impacts of food production by enabling the same agricultural resources to feed a larger human population, it is unclear to what extent the requirements of the EAT-Lancet diet may be met at the global scale without exceeding the planetary boundaries for land and water.
A new study co-authored by ESPM Professor Paolo D’Odorico evaluates the extent to which the EAT-Lancet dietary requirements may be met worldwide. Published today in Nature Sustainability, the study used a spatially distributed agro-hydrological model, accounting for local environmental flow limits to crop water consumption.
The researchers found that changes in crop distribution improving crop suitability across the global farmed land—and an increase in global agricultural trade—would allow the global population to be fed with the EAT-Lancet diet, while reducing the global cultivated area by 37%, irrigation water consumption by 78%, and unsustainably irrigated areas by 22%. The study also evaluated the affordability of the EAST-Lancet diet and found that it would entail a 4.5% increase in food costs.