Transforming the global food system for environmental sustainability and food security

The global food system simultaneously drives and is threatened by intersecting planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation and desertification, and pollution and waste. Food production and consumption generate approximately one-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, account for 39% of global deforestation, and impose external costs estimated at US$15 to US$20 trillion annually. This is roughly double the US$9 trillion value of food consumed each year globally. While total food production has consistently increased since the Green Revolution, over 700 million people remain chronically hungry, 878 million adults are obese, and all countries face at least one form of malnutrition. Projections indicate that total food demand will rise 35% between 2020 and 2050, leading to further biodiversity loss, accelerating climate change, and worsening nutritional inequity, if we stay on a business-as-usual course. The fuel and fertilizer shortage and the resulting risk of a major food crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz demonstrate the structural fragility of current food systems. This paper synthesizes findings of state-of-the-art scientific literature into a set of solutions for delivering food systems that are simultaneously productive, nutritionally adequate, environmentally sustainable, and socially just. We categorize the solutions in five pathways: shifting to healthy and sustainable diets; improving crop, livestock, and aquatic food production and land-use systems; reducing food loss and waste while increasing circularity; expanding novel foods and production processes; and restructuring food industry market structures and trade. These pathways are mutually reinforcing and must be pursued simultaneously. Their combined deployment could contribute to climate mitigation, reduce global agricultural land expansion, and reduce diet-attributable disease burden — outcomes that no individual pathway achieves in isolation. Policy reforms, including subsidy repurposing, true-cost pricing, and coordinated trade policy, are critical to foster enabling conditions across all pathways. Making our food systems environmentally and socially sustainable requires urgent, coordinated, and integrated action from all actors across the food value chain.