Designing a future food vision for the Nordics through a participatory modeling approach

Abstract

The development of future food systems will depend on normative decisions taken at different levels by policymakers and stakeholders. Scenario modeling is an adequate tool for assessing the implications of such decisions, but for an enlightened debate, it is important to make explicit and transparent how such value-based decisions affect modeling results. In a participatory approach working with five NGOs, we developed a future food vision for the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) through an iterative process of defining the scenario, modeling, and revising the scenario, until a final future food vision was reached. The impacts on food production, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions, and the resulting diets in the food vision, were modeled using a mass flow model of the food system. The food vision formulated was an organic farming system where food is produced locally and livestock production is limited to "leftover streams," i.e., by-products from food production and forage from pastures and perennial grass/clover mixtures, thus limiting food-feed competition. Consumption of meat, especially non-ruminant meat, was substantially reduced compared with current consumption in the Nordic countries (− 81%). An estimated population of 37 million people could be supplied with the scenario diet, which uses 0.21 ha of arable land and causes greenhouse gas emissions of 0.48 tCO 2 e per diet and year. The novelty of this paper includes advancing modeling of sustainable food systems by using an iterative process for designing future food visions based on stakeholder values, which enables results from multidisciplinary modeling (including agronomy, environmental system analysis, animal and human nutrition) to be fed back into the decision-making process, providing an empirical basis for normative decisions and a science-based future vision of sustainable food systems.

Transformations towards sustainable food systems: contrasting Swedish practitioner perspectives with the European Commission’s Farm to Fork Strategy

“…The Farm to Fork Strategy indicates similar notions in its ambition to include citizens and stakeholders, at several governance levels, when defining sustainable food and formulating policies. Previous research in the Nordic countries has shown that while there is agreement at large on the key challenges of food systems, local, regional, national, and supranational perspectives on strategies, mechanisms and priorities differ (Karlsson et al 2018). The results of this study point towards a similar conclusion, indicating the importance of governance and policies to be diverse, acting at multiple levels, and to be adaptive to accommodate several different possible transformation pathways (de Krom and Muilwijk 2019; Stringer et al 2020).…”

Synergies and Trade-Offs for Sustainable Food Production in Sweden: An Integrated Approach

“…The involvement of the stakeholders in this study proved useful, and there was agreement between the authors and stakeholders on the knowledge gaps and future research needs, as well as some of the most important sustainability interventions. There were also some similarities between key interventions identified by stakeholders in this, and another recent study, aimed at developing a future food vision for the Nordic countries [22]. For example, the focus on small-scale farming, biogas production, and subsequent nutrient recycling, decreasing food wastage, and only using animals that can be fed using biproducts and waste streams (i.e., limited livestock production) was identified by stakeholders in both studies, while only one of the stakeholders interviewed for our study brought up the importance of organic farming, which was considered important in the Nordic study.…”

“…There are examples of studies that have examined sustainable food production in terms of environmental impacts as well as economic and social dimensions [9,22]. However, these rarely consider the entire food production chain or all relevant dimensions or focus on ReDiReL.…”

Incorporation of novel foods in European diets can reduce global warming potential, water use and land use by over 80%

“…To understand how requiring the model to include some ASF in OMN diets would affect the environmental impacts, we optimized an OMN diet (OMN.1) with limits on ±80% of the current mean intake (g/day) of ASF-meats, dairy, eggs, fish/seafood, animal-fats. Several previous diet models indicate large reductions (≥80%) in ASF are required for minimized environmental impact 23,62 . Finally, to understand how NFFs may or may not be privileged over ASF in the model, we ran a last sensitivity analysis which allowed both ASF and NFF (OMN-NFF), subject to the original nutrition constraints and feasible consumption constraints on the intake of all food items.…”