• Energy Research

AbstractGovernments are updating national strategies to meet global goals on biodiversity, climate change and food systems proposed in the Convention on Biological Diversity post-2020 framework and agreed at the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP26) and Food Systems Summit (UNFSS). This represents a unique and crucial opportunity to integrate and accelerate food system actions to tackle interconnected global challenges. In this context, agroecology is a game-changing approach that can provide the world’s growing population with nutritious, healthy affordable food, ensure fair incomes to farmers and halt and reverse the degradation of the natural environment. Here, we explore agroecological transition pathways in four case studies from low- and middle- income countries and identify catalysts for change. We find that enabling policy and market environments, participatory action research and local socio-technical support each plays a critical role in stimulating transitions towards agroecology. We propose strategies and priorities for research to better support agroecological transitions using these catalysts of change as entry points. Engagement of governments, private sector, civil society, farmers and farm workers in this research agenda is essential.

The diversity of plants, animals and microorganisms that directly or indirectly support food and agriculture is critical to achieving healthy diets and agroecosystems. Here we present the Agrobiodiversity Index (based on 22 indicators), which provides a monitoring framework and informs food systems policy. Agrobiodiversity Index calculations for 80 countries reveal a moderate mean agrobiodiversity status score (56.0 out of 100), a moderate mean agrobiodiversity action score (47.8 out of 100) and a low mean agrobiodiversity commitment score (21.4 out of 100), indicating that much stronger commitments and concrete actions are needed to enhance agrobiodiversity across the food system. Mean agrobiodiversity status scores in consumption and conservation are 14-82% higher in developed countries than in developing countries, while scores in production are consistently low across least developed, developing and developed countries. We also found an absence of globally consistent data for several important components of agrobiodiversity, including varietal, functional and underutilized species diversity.

AbstractThis Analysis presents a recently developed food system indicator framework and holistic monitoring architecture to track food system transformation towards global development, health and sustainability goals. Five themes are considered: (1) diets, nutrition and health; (2) environment, natural resources and production; (3) livelihoods, poverty and equity; (4) governance; and (5) resilience. Each theme is divided into three to five indicator domains, and indicators were selected to reflect each domain through a consultative process. In total, 50 indicators were selected, with at least one indicator available for every domain. Harmonized data of these 50 indicators provide a baseline assessment of the world’s food systems. We show that every country can claim positive outcomes in some parts of food systems, but none are among the highest ranked across all domains. Furthermore, some indicators are independent of national income, and each highlights a specific aspiration for healthy, sustainable and just food systems. The Food Systems Countdown Initiative will track food systems annually to 2030, amending the framework as new indicators or better data emerge.

AbstractAgriculture is the largest single source of environmental degradation, responsible for over 30% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, 70% of freshwater use and 80% of land conversion: it is the single largest driver of biodiversity loss (Foley JA, Science 309:570–574, 2005, Nature 478:337–342, 2011; IPBES. Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. IPBES Secretariat, Bonn, 2019; Willett W et al. The Lancet 393:447–492, 2019). Agriculture also underpins poor human health, contributing to 11 million premature deaths annually. While too many still struggle from acute hunger, a growing number of individuals, including in low to middle-income countries (LMICs), struggle to access healthy foods. Greater consideration for, and integration of, biodiversity in agriculture is a key solution space for improving health, eliminating hunger and achieving nature-positive development objectives.This rapid evidence review documents the best available evidence of agriculture’s relationships with biodiversity, drawing on the contributions of leading biodiversity experts, and recommends actions that can be taken to move towards more biodiversity/nature-positive production through the delivery of integrated agricultural solutions for climate, biodiversity, nutrition and livelihoods. The analysis, which takes a whole-of-food-system approach, brings together a large body of evidence. It accounts for aspects not typically captured in a stand-alone primary piece of research and indicates where there are critical gaps.

Capturing countries’ commitments for measuring and monitoring progress towards certain goals, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), remains underexplored. The Agrobiodiversity Index bridges this gap by using text mining techniques to quantify countries’ commitments towards safeguarding and using agrobiodiversity for healthy diets, sustainable agriculture, and effective genetic resource management. The Index extracts potentially relevant sections of official documents, followed by manual sifting and scoring to identify agrobiodiversity-related commitments and assign scores. Our aim is to present the text mining methodology used in the Agrobiodiversity Index and the calculated commitments scores for nine countries while identifying methodological improvements to strengthen it. Our results reveal that levels of commitment towards using and protecting agrobiodiversity vary between countries, with most showing the strongest commitments to enhancing agrobiodiversity for genetic resource management followed by healthy diets. No commitments were found in any country related to some specific themes including varietal diversity, seed diversity, and functional diversity. The revised text mining methodology can be used for benchmarking, learning, and improving policies to enable conservation and sustainable use of agrobiodiversity. This low-cost, rapid, remotely applicable approach to capture and analyse policy commitments can be readily applied for tracking progress towards meeting other sustainability objectives.