Agroecological practices in combination with healthy diets can help meet EU food system policy targets
Abstract
Agroecology has been proposed as a strategy to improve food system sustainability, but has also been criticised for using land inefficiently. We compared five explorative storylines, developed in a stakeholder process, for future food systems in the EU to 2050. We modelled a range of biophysical (e.g., land use and food production), environmental (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions) and social indicators, and potential for regional food self-sufficiency, and investigated the economic policy needed to reach these futures by 2050. Two contrasting storylines for upscaling agroecological practices emerged. In one, agroecology was implemented to produce high-value products serving high-income consumers through trade but, despite 40% of agricultural area being under organic management, only two out of eight EU environmental policy targets were met. As diets followed current trends in this storyline, there were few improvements in environmental indicators compared with the current situation, despite large-scale implementation of agroecological farming practices. This suggests that large-scale implementation of agroecological practices without concurrent changes on the demand side could aggravate existing environmental pressures. However, our second agroecological storyline showed that if large-scale diffusion of agroecological farming practices were implemented alongside drastic dietary change and waste reductions, major improvements on environmental indicators could be achieved and…
Read the paper
Related studies
- Contribution of social science to large scale biodiversity conservation: A review of research about the Natura 2000 network
- The alignment of agricultural and nature conservation policies in the European Union
- Determination of ecological significance based on geostatistical assessment: a case study from the Slovak Natura 2000 protected area
- Routledge Handbook of the Study of the Commons
- Farmers' acceptance of results-based agri-environmental schemes: A German perspective
- Approaches to Identify the Value of Seminatural Habitats for Conservation Biological Control
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.