Introduction
Since our era as hunters and gatherers, we have been transforming the land to obtain the food needed for survival. We’ve felled forests, plowed lands, tamed waters, and developed various substances and materials to satisfy our ever-growing appetite. This has allowed us to surpass Thomas Malthus’s predictions, who believed we would be unable to keep up with the population growth and that there wouldn’t be enough food for everyone.
We succeeded, to the point where we now face concerns about obesity epidemics as much as hunger. Various technologies have enabled the continuous production, conservation, and distribution of food across almost the entire planet. However, the environmental cost has been devastating: agriculture and livestock are responsible for many of our environmental problems.
The Current Impact of the Global Food System
Different studies estimate that the global food system causes 26% of greenhouse gas emissions, 80% of deforestation, and 70% of freshwater consumption. It is also the leading cause of terrestrial biodiversity loss. Additionally, unsustainable agricultural practices further degrade soil, deplete nutrients and groundwater, and contaminate terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems with agrochemicals.
A New Approach: Three Strategies for a Sustainable Food System
1. Reduce Food Waste
The first proposal is straightforward: stop throwing away food that has already cost so much effort, energy, and resources to produce. It may seem surprising, but nearly a third of what we produce ends up in the trash. This happens for two reasons: overproduction, making the product’s price lower than its production cost, and aesthetic standards that make imperfect-looking food unattractive to consumers.
Reducing food waste by 75% by 2050 could free up more than 13 million square kilometers of land, saving resources and reducing CO₂ emissions by 102 gigatonnes.
2. Restore Degraded Soils
Our second proposal is to restore 50% of degraded lands by 2050, focusing on agricultural areas. This would recover the ecological functionality of 3 million square kilometers of agricultural land (with a potential to mitigate 21 Gt CO₂-eq) and nearly 9 million square kilometers of natural areas (with a potential to mitigate 128 Gt CO₂-eq).
This restoration not only promotes biodiversity recovery and carbon sequestration in ecosystems but also strengthens local communities and small farmers by promoting sustainable land management practices.
3. Increase Consumption of Seafood
The third path highlights the enormous potential of responsibly produced marine food, which requires fewer resources. Replacing 70% of unsustainably produced red meat and 10% of vegetables with seaweed and its derivatives could free up 17.5 million square kilometers of land used for pastures, fodder, and feed (similar to soybean and corn forage). Simultaneously, the global food system’s impact would be significantly reduced:
- Greenhouse gas emissions (145 Gt CO₂-eq)
- Land degradation
- Deforestation
- Excessive water use
- Biodiversity loss
Pelagic fish (those living in the open ocean away from the coast), wild salmonoids, and cultivated bivalves provide more nutrients with fewer emissions and a nearly negligible synthetic water and chemical footprint compared to most terrestrial animal food sources.
Three Conventions Moving in the Same Direction
Our proposal aims to address these goals collectively, tackling the main environmental challenges of Earth as outlined in the three United Nations conventions stemming from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro:
- The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating climate change.
- The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), aimed at conserving biodiversity.
- The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which aims to combat land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas, promoting sustainable land management practices and fostering the development of affected communities.
Despite the clear interdependencies between these three conventions and the central role of land in achieving their objectives, most research on their implementation has treated the agreements separately. In terms of financial investments and attention, efforts to combat land degradation are uneven across the three agreements.
Following the Parties’ Conferences (COPs) of the three Rio conventions in late 2024, joint initiatives like the Rio Trio have been promoted to encourage integrated and systemic solutions.
The COPs have shown growing interest in prioritizing land and its degradation, recognizing the crucial role of soils and sustainable agriculture in resolving these crises. However, food systems have yet to be fully integrated into intergovernmental agreements and receive adequate attention.
Harnessing the potential of sustainable, integrated food systems would not only help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals but also enable countries to uphold a recently recognized human right: the right to a clean and healthy environment.
