There is a clear need to shift toward healthier and more sustainable food systems. According to the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission Report, global adoption of a flexitarian Planetary Health Diet could prevent around 15 million premature adult deaths per year.
Today, food systems account for around one-third of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and are the main driver of five planetary boundary transgressions. At the same time, one-third of all food is lost or wasted, while half of the world's habitable land is used for agriculture—mostly for livestock and animal feed.
To explore the potential impacts of a food system transformation, researchers used 10 global food system models to compare a business-as-usual scenario through 2050 with a transformation scenario characterized by healthy diets, improved agricultural productivity and halved food waste. The findings are published in the journal Nature.
Hermann Lotze-Campen, PIK research department head and co-author, said, "Our study shows that continuing on the current path is the more expensive option. Providing healthy diets for a growing global population by 2050 would maintain the overall value of agricultural production near 2020 levels while simultaneously reducing environmental and health costs compared with business as usual."
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