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

MOSNIER, ALINE; JAVALERA-RINCON, VALERIA; JONES, SARAH K; FRANK, FEDERICO; MONJEAU, ADRIAN

ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Año: 2023 vol. 18

1748-9326

The achievement of several sustainable development goals and the Paris Climate Agreementdepends on rapid progress towards sustainable food and land systems in all countries. We havebuilt a flexible, collaborative modeling framework to foster the development of national pathwaysby local research teams and their integration up to global scale. Local researchers independentlycustomize national models to explore mid-century pathways of the food and land use systemtransformation in collaboration with stakeholders. An online platform connects the nationalmodels, 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 netforest gain per year, 950 Mha net gain in the land where natural processes predominate, and anincreased 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 allcountries. We show examples of how the global linkage impacts national results and how differentassumptions in national pathways impact global results. This modeling setup acknowledges thebroad heterogeneity of socio-ecological contexts and the fact that people who live in these differentcontexts should be empowered to design the future they want. But it also demonstrates to localdecision-makers the interconnectedness of our food and land use system and the urgent need formore collaboration to converge local and global priorities.