Delivering food security on limited land

The final report from the international consortium project “Delivering Food Security on Limited Land” highlights the need for sustainable intensification, lower consumption of livestock products, and waste reduction by 50% to be able to provide food and nutrition security on limited land area and poor soil quality.

Delivering Food Security on Limited Land

The international consortium Delivering Food Security on Limited Land strived to examine feedbacks and interactions between land use change and food security dynamics. The project was supported by national funding bodies, coordinated through the Belmont Forum and the FACCE-JPI Initiative. The ETH Zurich World Food System Center (WFSC), with Prof. Nina Buchmann as Principal Investigator, led the stakeholder engagement and knowledge exchange activities for the consortium.
In the final report of the project to the Swiss National Science Foundation, the main results and WFSC contributions were highlighted. The project, with its many collaborators, concluded that food and nutrition security cannot be achieved under current soil management regimes when global population increases as projected. However, a combination of three elements, i.e. sustainable intensification, lower consumption of livestock products, and waste reduction by 50% of current levels, is indeed able to provide food and nutrition security on limited land area and poor soil quality.

Find out more about the project at external pagehttp://deliveringfoodsecurity.org

More about ETH Zurich's contribution as part of SNF National Research Programme "Sustainable Use of Soil as a Resource" (NRP 68): external pagehttp://www.nfp68.ch/en/projects/facce-jpi-food-security-and-climate-change/devil

The WFSC acted as an education and outreach partner in project, developing and coordinating summer schools, publishing articles about teaching methods for complex systems, and collaborating to produce public outreach materials. The World Food System Summer Schools in 2017 and 2019 (South Africa, Switzerland) were organized in partnership the project. These courses bring together 20-25 students and young professionals from ETH Zurich and universities from around the world for a two week intensive course on food systems. More about WFS Summer Schools

In addition, publications highlighting the development of 12 design criteria for such training courses and an assessment of the rich picture method to teach about food and nutrition security were published. These criteria and methods have great potential to be applied in settings where stakeholders need to engage with a highly complex topic like food and nutrition security or sustainable soil management. More about the 12 design criteria or the rich picture method

Lastly, the WFSC contributed to outreach initiatives, such as the Food Matters interactive report from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota “Is Climate Change a Risk to Global Grazing Lands?” as well as the Food Climate Research Network animated video “Grazed and Confused? How much can grazing livestock help to mitigate climate change?”

The research group of Prof. Nina Buchmann also published two articles looking at the interaction of nitrogen availability in soil and crop legumes: Crops, Nitrogen, Water: Are Legumes Friend, Foe, or Misunderstood Ally? and external pageContrasting responses of crop legumes and cereals to nitrogen availability by Adams, Mark.; et al.

Delivering Food Security on Limited Land
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