What does it take to produce food? Think of it in layers, starting from the ground up. The bottom layer is the physical geography—perhaps a broad, flat plain, gently sloping toward a shallow river basin. Over the plains accumulates humus-rich soil, dense with carbon, calcium, and magnesium. Layer on a humid climate with heavy rains from June through September, and you have the conditions that support wheat and rice production in northern India.

What is a Food System?

A food system is the complex web of activities—and the beliefs and values that shape these activities—associated with producing and consuming food. This includes the production, processing, transport, preparation, consumption, and disposal of food.

Food and Nature: Risks and Rewards

Food systems transformation is often viewed as a global challenge, and with good reason—food production is a major driver of climate change and the destruction of nature, accounting for nearly one third of greenhouse gas emissions and 80 percent of land-use change globally. At the same time, climate change and biodiversity loss will make it much harder to produce food in the future, threatening the livelihoods of producers and ultimately making it more difficult to feed a growing population.

But food systems also hold great potential for positive change. A nature-based transformation in the global food system will actually help to mitigate climate change and restore biodiversity, while also maintaining or even improving the livelihoods of food producers.

Or perhaps it’s not a plain, but a series of mountain ridges and river-carved valleys, as in southern Spain, where food grows on pockets of quick draining soil under warm, dry summers and wet mild winters, supporting a patchwork of olive and almond groves with livestock grazing in between.
The report, Foodscapes: Toward food system transition was published on 21 October 2021 and represents the most advanced research and mapping effort on foodscapes to date.

It identifies pathways towards transformative change in the food sector and draws on global expertise, but on a local scale with individual case studies aimed at informing the transition toward more sustainable food production.

The report encompasses over 80 foodscape classes identified through a combination of multiple datasets to build an integrated picture of the biophysical drivers of food production such as soil type and climate, and management variables that include crop type, water management, and agronomic considerations.

IIASA researcher, Martin Jung, who helped develop the global map highlights said, "The foodscapes we mapped could prove to be a new class of fundamental food production units that integrate multiple dimensions of where and how people grow food."

The report will help inform the vital transformations needed to ensure worldwide food security into the future by bringing local context to global outlooks and supplying important realities such as political and economic necessities of food-producing communities.

It also highlights the many threats and opportunities that food production faces currently and in the future.

"The concept of foodscapes provides novel opportunities for scenario analyses of agricultural land management as it employs the scale of clearly defined landscapes and therefore goes beyond the sole consideration of its primary productive elements such as cropland and grassland," explains IIASA researcher, Christian Folberth, who led the scenario analysis on nature-based solutions for foodscapes on the project.