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Meat and dairy alternatives are promoted for diet sustainability. Here, the authors use a modelling approach to show that replacing 50% of pork, chicken, beef and milk globally with plant-based alternatives can reduce GHG emissions by 6.3 Gt CO₂eq year^-1 and more than half biodiversity loss by 2050.

Seaweed farming could reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint, but its potential is not well-explored yet. This study shows how globally extended aquaculture can reduce terrestrial crops demand and greenhouse gas emissions while providing a substitute or supplement for food, animal feeds and fuel.

Increasing nitrogen use efficiency is the most effective strategy to reduce undernourishment while respecting the nitrogen boundaries in regions such as China and India. This supply-side effort plays a more important role in alleviating food insecurity than demand-side efforts such as diet shifts and reduced waste when introducing regional nitrogen targets.

Emissions abatement efforts in the agriculture, forestry and land-use sector are vital to achieve climate change mitigation targets, but their effects on food security remain poorly understood. Using six global agroeconomic models, this study explores how afforestation, bioenergy and non-CO₂ emissions reductions could impact agricultural prices and the risk of hunger under different scenarios.

To promote the recovery of the currently declining global trends in terrestrial biodiversity, increases in both the extent of land under conservation management and the sustainability of the global food system from farm to fork are required.

Meeting China’s growing demand for food, especially for livestock products, will have huge environmental impacts domestically and globally. This study finds large increases in land, water, fertilizer and greenhouse gas emissions that vary based on openness of trade.

The impacts of climate change on agriculture differ regionally and will increase hunger globally. Reducing tariffs and other barriers to international trade would mitigate this, but trade integration requires a careful approach to avoid reducing domestic food security in food-exporting regions.

A scenario simulation to tackle hunger globally reveals that improving food availability for the under-nourished through better distribution has a better environmental performance than increasing overall food availability.

There lacks model comparison of global land use change projections. Here the authors explored how different long-term drivers determine land use and food availability projections and they showed that the key determinants population growth and improvements in agricultural efficiency.

To achieve the climate target of the Paris Agreement substantial emission reductions will be required across economic sectors. Here the authors show that agriculture can make a significant contribution to non-CO₂ mitigation efforts through structural change in the livestock sector and the deployment of technical options.

Trade liberalization in the early 21st century increased the adaptation capacity of global food systems to climate change; further liberalization and trade facilitation could help to avoid dozens of millions being undernourished at mid-century. The global trade agenda should explicitly include climate change adaptation to achieve SDG 2 Zero Hunger.

Agricultural CH₄ and N₂O emissions represent around 11% of total anthropogenic GHGs. Here agriculture mitigation potentials are quantified, in the context of the 1.5 °C target, and decomposed by emission source, region and mitigation mechanism.

The Paris Agreement is based on emission scenarios that move from a sluggish phase-out of fossil fuels to large-scale late-century negative emissions. Alternative pathways of early deployment of negative emission technologies need to be considered to ensure that climate targets are reached safely and sustainably.

Economy-wide GHG emissions reductions may negatively affect food security. Stringent mitigation policies, modelled as carbon prices, are shown to lead to an increase in production costs, food prices and the population’s risk of hunger.

Achieving sustainable development goals while meeting the 1.5 °C climate target requires radical changes to how we use energy. A scenario of low energy demand shows how this can be done by down-sizing the global energy system to enable feasible deployment rates of renewable energy resources.

Technologies and systemic innovation are critical for the transformation of the food system. This Perspective identifies promising technologies, assesses their readiness and proposes eight action points to accelerate innovation.

This Review article looks at options for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock sector, including technical and management interventions, sustainable intensification of production and moderation of demand for livestock products.