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Ambitious international targets are being developed to protect and restore biodiversity under the Convention on Biological Diversity's post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and the European Union's Green Deal. Yet, the land system consequences of meeting such targets are unclear, as multiple pathways may be able to deliver on the set targets. This paper introduces a novel scenario approach assessing the plural implementations of these targets. The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) developed by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services aims to illustrate the different, positive ways in which society can value nature. It therefore offers a lens through which the spatial implementation of sustainability targets may be envisioned. We used CLUMondo, a spatially explicit model, to simulate plural land system scenarios for Europe for 2050. The model builds on current land system representations of Europe and explores how and where sustainability targets can be implemented under projected population trends and commodity demands. We created three different scenarios in which the sustainability targets are met, each representing an alternative, normative view on nature as represented by the NFF, favoring land systems providing strong climate regulation (Nature for Society), species conservation (Nature for Nature), or agricultural heritage features (Nature as Culture). Our results show that, irrespective of the NFF view, meeting sustainability targets will require European land systems to drastically change, as natural grasslands and forests are forecast to expand while productive areas are projected to undergo a dual intensification and diversification trajectory. Despite each NFF perspective showcasing a similar direction of change, 20% of Europe's land area will differ based on the adopted NFF perspective, with hotspots of disagreement identified in eastern and western Europe. These simulations go beyond existing scenario approaches by not only depicting broad societal developments for Europe, but also by quantifying the land system synergies and trade-offs associated with alternative, archetypal, interpretations and values of how nature may be managed for sustainability. This quantification exemplifies a means towards constructive dialogue, on the one hand by acknowledging areas of contention, and bringing such issues to the fore, and on the other by highlighting points of convergence in a vision for a sustainable Europe.

Water use efficiency (WUE) is a quantitative measurement which improvement is a major issue in the context of global warming and restrictions in water availability for agriculture. In this study, we aimed at studying the variation and genetic control of WUE and the respective role of its components (plant biomass and transpiration) in a perennial fruit crop. We explored an INRA apple core collection grown in a phenotyping platform to screen one-year-old scions for their accumulated biomass, transpiration and WUE under optimal growing conditions. Plant biomass was decompose into morphological components related to either growth or organ expansion. For each trait, nine mixed models were evaluated to account for the genetic effect and spatial heterogeneity inside the platform. The Best Linear Unbiased Predictors of genetic values were estimated after model selection. Mean broad-sense heritabilities were calculated from variance estimates. Heritability values indicated that biomass (0.76) and WUE (0.73) were under genetic control. This genetic control was lower in plant transpiration with an heritability of 0.54. Across the collection, biomass accounted for 70% of the WUE variability. A Hierarchical Ascendant Classification of the core collection indicated the existence of six groups of genotypes with contrasting morphology and WUE. Differences between morphotypes were interpreted as resulting from differences in the main processes responsible for plant growth: cell division leading to the generation of new organs and cell elongation leading to organ dimension. Although further studies will be necessary on mature trees with more complex architecture and multiple sinks such as fruits, this study is a first step for improving apple plant material for the use of water.

The stark observation of the co-existence of undernourishment, nutrient deficiencies and overweight and obesity, the triple burden of malnutrition, is inviting us to reconsider health and nutrition as the primary goal and final endpoint of food systems. Agriculture and the food industry have made remarkable advances in the past decades. However, their development has not entirely fulfilled health and nutritional needs, and moreover, they have generated substantial collateral losses in agricultural biodiversity. Simultaneously, several regions are experiencing unprecedented weather events caused by climate change and habitat depletion, in turn putting at risk global food and nutrition security. This coincidence of food crises with increasing environmental degradation suggests an urgent need for novel analyses and new paradigms. The sustainable diets concept proposes a research and policy agenda that strives towards a sustainable use of human and natural resources for food and nutrition security, highlighting the preeminent role of consumers in defining sustainable options and the importance of biodiversity in nutrition. Food systems act as complex social–ecological systems, involving multiple interactions between human and natural components. Nutritional patterns and environment structure are interconnected in a mutual dynamic of changes. The systemic nature of these interactions calls for multidimensional approaches and integrated assessment and simulation tools to guide change. This paper proposes a review and conceptual modelling framework that articulate the synergies and tradeoffs between dietary diversity, widely recognised as key for healthy diets, and agricultural biodiversity and associated ecosystem functions, crucial resilience factors to climate and global changes.

Significance Bioethanol produced from waste biomass from crops has the potential to provide a sustainable alternative to petroleum-based transportation fuel that does not compete with human food supply. The main obstacle to this approach is the resistance of this biomass to digestion. Thus, expensive energetic pretreatment and high enzyme inputs are needed to increase digestion. In this study, we screened a population of randomly mutated plants for digestibility with the aim of identifying novel factors that impact on this trait. We found a number of mutants with high digestibility and no impairments in growth or fitness. These mutants show a range of alterations in cell-wall composition, and we have mapped and characterized the mutant with the highest increase in digestibility.

Asseng, S. et al. Crop models are essential tools for assessing the threat of climate change to local and global food production1. Present models used to predict wheat grain yield are highly uncertain when simulating how crops respond to temperature2. Here we systematically tested 30 different wheat crop models of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project against field experiments in which growing season mean temperatures ranged from 15 °C to 32 °C, including experiments with artificial heating. Many models simulated yields well, but were less accurate at higher temperatures. The model ensemble median was consistently more accurate in simulating the crop temperature response than any single model, regardless of the input information used. Extrapolating the model ensemble temperature response indicates that warming is already slowing yield gains at a majority of wheat-growing locations. Global wheat production is estimated to fall by 6% for each °C of further temperature increase and become more variable over space and time. We thank the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project and its leaders C. Rosenzweig from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University (USA), J. Jones from University of Florida (USA), J. Hatfield from United States Department of Agriculture (USA) and J. Antle from Oregon State University (USA) for support. We also thank M. Lopez from CIMMYT (Turkey), M. Usman Bashir from University of Agriculture, Faisalabad (Pakistan), S. Soufizadeh from Shahid Beheshti University (Iran), and J. Lorgeou and J-C. Deswarte from ARVALIS—Institut du Végétal (France) for assistance with selecting key locations and quantifying regional crop cultivars, anthesis and maturity dates and R. Raymundo for assistance with GIS. S.A. and D.C. received financial support from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). C.S. was funded through USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture award 32011-68002-30191. C.M. received financial support from the KULUNDA project (01LL0905L) and the FACCE MACSUR project (031A103B) funded through the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). F.E. received support from the FACCE MACSUR project (031A103B) funded through the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (2812ERA115) and E.E.R. was funded through the German Science Foundation (project EW 119/5-1). M.J. and J.E.O. were funded through the FACCE MACSUR project by the Danish Strategic Research Council. K.C.K. and C.N. were funded by the FACCE MACSUR project through the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL). F.T., T.P. and R.P.R. received financial support from FACCE MACSUR project funded through the Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MMM); F.T. was also funded through National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41071030). C.B. was funded through the Helmholtz project ‘REKLIM—Regional Climate Change: Causes and Effects’ Topic 9: ‘Climate Change and Air Quality’. M.P.R. and P.D.A. received funding from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS). G.O’L. was funded through the Australian Grains Research and Development Corporation and the Department of Environment and Primary Industries Victoria, Australia. R.C.I. was funded by Texas AgriLife Research, Texas A&M University. E.W. and Z.Z. were funded by CSIRO and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) through the research project ‘Advancing crop yield while reducing the use of water and nitrogen’ and by the CSIRO-MoE PhD Research Program. Peer reviewed