Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Soil microbial communities sustain key ecosystem services but are impacted by global change, including warming. Some agricultural soil microbiomes show resistance to perturbation and could be engineered to confer resistance to more fragile systems.
Empirical evidence on the contribution of different pathways through which homestead food production programmes may improve women’s dietary diversity remains scarce. In Bangladesh, garden production and nutrition education were found to be critical.
Models of China’s food supply suggest that expanding plant-based production could improve micronutrient availability. More granular data on food composition, nutrient bioavailability and population micronutrient status are essential to validate these models and inform food policy in China.
Manure management and land application can improve soil health and nutrient recycling but can also be a major source of air pollutant emissions and regional eutrophication. A high-resolution, regional framework can now facilitate assessment of current and future manure management policies in a representative livestock-dense region of Europe.
Data collected over 27 years show that ecological and social sustainability can quietly diverge, driven by factors that fisheries assessments typically overlook. For small-scale reef fishers in Kenya, rising fish prices and higher catches have failed to translate into decent earnings, with fewer than 2% making the national minimum wage.
A climate-yield model of French apple production quantifies the potential for future climate change adaptation in this sector. While cooler regions can still reap benefits from a warming climate in the short term, yield losses will become increasingly frequent by 2050 due to the lack of adaptive capacity to heat stress.
Adaptive multi-paddock grazing can improve soil carbon storage, pasture productivity and farm profitability, but enteric methane and the constraints of intensive global farming underscore the need for broader interventions.
Fishing gear and location influence the nutrient composition of harvests. Fishery nutrient profiles can identify fishing methods that provide multiple nutrients of public health concern, offering an approach to analyse alignment between fishery management and nutrition goals.
Dietary shifts remain challenging to achieve. A modelling study explores uncertainty around behavioural change, showing that region-specific approaches can foster more effective dietary transitions than focusing solely on achieving global targets, with positive implications for food system sustainability.
Food systems encompass broad socioeconomic contexts involving several actors and sectors of society. Now, seven types of transition and six socioeconomic drivers have been identified that can facilitate or hinder sustainable food system transformations.
Fertilization sustainability requires balancing organic waste recycling benefits against soil contamination risks. Integrating dynamic risk assessment models into a territorial simulation platform is essential to support decision-making for recycling management.
A new modelling framework provides the most comprehensive picture yet of how agricultural and forestry commodities drive global forest loss and carbon emissions, revealing major gaps in current monitoring efforts.
Whether recurring unconditional cash transfers are effective at improving diets in high-income country settings has remained uncertain given competing demands of cash-constrained individuals. Evidence from Massachusetts, USA, demonstrates that recurring unconditional cash transfers reduced caloric deficits and improved consumption of nutritious foods.
Screening a chemical library resulted in the identification of compounds that reduced cereal grain phytic acid content, enhancing mineral bioavailability.
Our analysis of 40,000 environmental migration events shows that the most critical drivers of environmental migration in Somalia are water deficiency indicators: drought, insufficient soil moisture to meet crop water demand in rainfed agriculture (green water scarcity) and food insecurity. These factors directly affect farmers, pastoralists and agropastoralists — approximately 80% of the population.
Accurately measuring dietary intake has long been a challenge in nutrition research. Integrating emerging tools with multisampling strategies and a dietary assessment methodology aligned with the research aims enables a more objective and comprehensive evaluation of dietary behaviours—and a deeper understanding of diets’ impact on human and planetary health.
The absence of yield ceilings due to plant genetics and climatic factors indicates that agronomic management drives the wheat yield plateau. To break the plateau, profitable management of agronomic and soil factors, particularly diseases and soil conservation through less-intensive crop rotations, will be required.
The economic stakes that impede the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from the agrifood sector are high. In the European Union and UK, three dietary transition scenarios representing moderate, low and zero animal-sourced food consumption are estimated to lead to €61 billion, €168 billion and €255 billion in stranded assets, respectively.
