Abstract
Facing a growing and more affluent world population, changing climate and finite natural resources, world food systems will have to change in the future. The aim of the Agrimonde-Terra foresight study was to build global scenarios linking land use and food security, with special attention paid to overlooked aspects such as nutrition and health, in order to help explore the possible future of the global food system. In this article, we seek to highlight how the resulting set of scenarios contributes to the debate on land use and food security and enlarges the range of possible futures for the global food system. We highlight four main contributions. Combining a scenario building method based on morphological analysis and quantitative simulations with a tractable and simple biomass balance model, the proposed approach improves transparency and coherence between scenario narratives and quantitative assessment. Agrimonde-Terra’s scenarios comprise a wide range of alternative diets, with contrasting underlying nutritional and health issues, which accompany contrasting urbanization and rural transformation processes, both dimensions that are lacking in other sets of global scenarios. Agrimonde-Terra’s scenarios share some similarities with existing sets of global scenarios, notably the SSPs, but are usually less optimistic regarding agricultural land expansion up to 2050. Results suggest that changing global diets toward healthier patterns could also help to limit the expansion in agricultural land area. Agrimonde-Terra’s scenarios enlarge the scope of possible futures by proposing two pathways that are uncommon in other sets of global scenarios. The first proposes to explore possible reconnection of the food industry and regional production within supranational regional blocs. The second means that we should consider that a ‘perfect storm’, induced by climate change and an ecological crisis combined with social and economic crises, is still possible. Both scenarios should be part of the debate as the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic shows.
Highlights
Facing a growing and more affluent world population, changing climate and finite natural resources, world food systems will have to change in the future
Discussion), which largely explain the fact that our results show a difficulty in feeding the growing population in 2050 without expanding world agricultural land if world agriculture changes towards agroecology
The insights provided by scenarios in terms of land use and food and nutrition security show the importance of considering strongly contrasting dietary patterns and highlight the key role of rural-urban relationships in the transformation of food value chains
Summary
Facing a growing and more affluent world population, changing climate and finite natural resources, world food systems will have to change in the future. A series of work emphasized that changing consumption patterns and reducing food wastage in order to mitigate the rise in food demand and limit the negative impact of the global food system on natural resources and the environment should be part of the solution This wave of work, partly from the climate change research community, pointed out the major role of livestock production as a source of negative environmental effects and promoted a significant reduction in animal-based food consumption [6,7,8,9,10,11]. The results suggest that, combined with a reduction in food wastage and reduced consumption of animal-based foods, agroecological production systems, including organic farming, could feed a growing population without increasing agricultural land use and be part of a sustainable food future
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