Developing integrated environmental indicators for sustainable global food production and trade

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The proposed research aims to improve understanding of the environmental impact and sustainability of global food production and trade, and to propose solutions to alleviate this impact. The natural environment, providing us with essential resources and ecosystem services, is under increasing pressure from human activities. Importantly, increasing demand for food, due to population growth and socio-economic development, have led to the intensive use of water, land, and fertilisers in agriculture. Irrigation accounts for more than two thirds of freshwater withdrawn globally, and agriculture occupies more than one third of the Earth's land surface and emits a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, food production will need to significantly increase to feed about two additional billion people by 2050. Ensuring environmentally sustainable, sufficient food production is thus a difficult and pressing global challenge.To address this challenge, my research will provide critical improvements in our current understanding of the multiple environmental impacts of agriculture, by accounting for different practices and local conditions across the world. This will allow a comprehensive assessment of agricultural sustainability and help to quantify trade-offs associated with different agricultural management strategies. Indeed, as agricultural practices are tightly linked (e.g. water and soil management), it is essential to consider all major environmental aspects to avoid the unintended consequences of strategies focused on a single aspect. The research will also consider trade; following recent globalisation, international food trade has grown rapidly since the 1980s, allowing for the development of major export-oriented agricultural regions. This crucial role of trade in global agricultural systems will be integrated in the evaluation of potential pathways to achieve environmentally sustainable agriculture.The proposed research addresses critical areas of integration necessary to assess pathways to sustainable agriculture: (1) comprehensive estimation of environmental impacts, (2) integration across a range of products (crops and livestock), (3) innovative quantitative measures of sustainability and (4) simultaneous linking of all environmental stresses with global trade.To reach my research objectives, I will combine emerging environmental datasets and models to consistently estimate the potential environmental impacts of food production, via water and land resource use, eutrophication (ecosystem pollution through nutrient leakage) and climate change. I will then apply innovative techniques to combine these estimates into spatially detailed indicators of the environmental sustainability of global food production. This ambitious and innovative research project will provide the first tool to simultaneously evaluate the major environmental impacts of food systems. It is highly significant as it targets the key global challenges of environmental sustainability and food security. I will then combine the indicators with international food trade data to analyse the increasingly significant linkages between food producing regions and remote consumers. Finally, I will use the developed global datasets, indicators, and trade analysis to carry out country level case studies assessing pathways to achieving environmental sustainability of food production and supply.The research draws from environmental footprint analysis, which has been used successfully to both understand and stimulate policy interest in global resource use and scarcity. More recently, the interactions between water, food, trade and the climate have been increasingly recognised in many studies pinpointing the need for multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral approaches. Using state-of-the-art, emerging environmental datasets, this work will generate new knowledge on globally significant environmental processes and profile policy relevant insights.