The Food System Grand Challenge: A Climate Smart and Sustainable Food System for a Healthy Europe

Abstract

Current food systems rely on mass production processes that should be designed to provide people with nurturing and healthy food, and to ensure food access to every region around the world. However, unprecedented growing world populations, emerging production technologies, and diverging agendas from food system stakeholders have created a chasm in food systems. This chasm is evident in the alarming rate food production is straining environmental systems, as well as in the current rates of malnutrition and lack of food access. Indeed, evidence suggests that food production is one of the main contributors to climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater use, and land systems change. Due to the threats posed by current, interconnected, global food systems to health and environmental degeneracy, attempts to transform them in a more sustainable way are increasingly emerging all-around the world. In particular, the trend is to shift from isolated and individualized agendas to collective and integrated strategies with combined and interdependent targets that can effectively support the actual transformation of food systems to be more sustainable. In this chapter, we discuss how this sustainable transition of current food production and consumption systems may be spurred across multiple scales. We begin with an analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and discuss how they are all in some way related to multi-actor and trans-disciplinary food systems. We provide a synthesis of the current policies and strategies that most effectively drive toward a more holistic thinking of food systems. In this sense, the European scenario is particularly analysed, by introducing the concept of food ecosystems and how they help to address the sustainability paradigm. Finally, how the presence of an entrepreneurial mindset, skills, and opportunities can spur sustainable innovation is taken into consideration.