A decentralized approach to model national and global food and land use systems

Abstract

The achievement of several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement depends on rapid progress towards sustainable food and land systems in all countries. We have built a flexible, collaborative modeling framework to foster the development of national pathways by local research teams and their integration up to global scale. Local researchers independently customize national models to explore mid-century pathways of the food and land use system transformation in collaboration with stakeholders. An online platform connects the national models, iteratively balances global exports and imports, and aggregates results to the global level. Our results show that actions toward greater sustainability in countries could sum up to 1 Mha net forest gain per year, 950 Mha net gain in the land where natural processes predominate, and an increased CO2 sink of 3.7 GtCO2e yr-1 over the period 2020-2050 compared to current trends, while average food consumption per capita remains above the adequate food requirements in all countries. We show examples of how the global linkage impacts national results and how different assumptions in national pathways impact global results. This modeling setup acknowledges the broad heterogeneity of socio-ecological contexts and the fact that people who live in these different contexts should be empowered to design the future they want. But it also demonstrates to local decision-makers the interconnectedness of our food and land use system and the urgent need for more collaboration to converge local and global priorities.

Focus on global–local–global analysis of sustainability

“…While Haqiqi et al use a single integrated framework to capture these GLG interactions, Mosnier et al (2023) offer an alternative approach to conveying global change to local analyses. Their FABLE framework allows national models to independently develop sustainable pathways driven by national goals.…”

“…Examples from Costa Rica and China show how more integrated planning at landscape levels aimed at jointly providing multiple benefits can at least partially overcome policy collisions and improve outcomes in multiple dimensions. On a related theme, Mosnier et al (2023) highlight the interconnectedness of food and land use systems and the need for more collaborative planning across sectors and scales. They show that coordinated planning could result in large gains in agricultural productivity that would allow greater natural forest cover recovery and increases in carbon sequestration.…”

Ten new insights in climate science 2023

“…For example, a plurality of different narratives are developing in the debate over sustainable and alternative proteinssynthetic meat, plant-based substitutes, or small-scale farmingwhich open up critical questions on how existing power asymmetries and industrial control might be replicated or possibly avoided (Béné & Lundy, 2023;Sexton et al, 2019). The literature in the field has also argued convincingly for the importance of re-grounding food systems in regional circuits of production and consumption, including shedding light on food system precarity and trade dependencies (Li et al, 2022a;Mosnier et al, 2023), as well as recognizing the importance of social innovations (e.g. informal community gardening) in creating resilient biodiverse food systems (Hebinck et al, 2021).…”