skip to content

Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL)

February 2019: The EAT-Lancet Commission’s report delivers scientific targets for a healthy, plant-based diet with a low amount of animal-based foods. It promotes investments into smallholder farms and systems that operate in harmony with nature. Further, the report advocates policy changes and an effective governance of ocean and land use.

Information

The EAT-Lancet Commission is a 3-year project consisting of 37 experts from 16 countries with expertise in health, nutrition, environmental sustainability, food systems, economics, and political governance. The commission’s report states that current food production systems are exceeding planetary boundaries, which in turn drives climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and unsustainable uses in water and land use. To counteract these concerns, the report provides scientific targets for a healthy diet from a sustainable food production system that operates within planetary boundaries. It further underlines that health and environmental sustainability are interlinked and promotes a mostly plant-based diet based on with only low amounts of animal protein, refined grains, processed food, and added sugar. The commission states that food production must rise by 50% in the next 30 years to feed the global population, which requires a fundamental shift in production and consumption patterns, especially towards less and better meat.

Implications & Opportunities

The report offers a scientific foundation to underpin and drive a shift towards sustainable food consumption and production patterns. It offers new opportunities for organic farming, agro-ecology, permaculture, and biodynamics that endeavour to operate in harmony with natural systems. At the centre of the findings are investments into smallholder productions that currently operate in poor and insecure environments. Moreover, a shift requires policies that encourage people to choose healthy diets and ensure accessible and affordable healthy foods in all income groups. Additional opportunities lie in refocusing agricultural production from high yield cash crops to more diverse production systems and promoting food production systems that at least halve global food waste. Equally, effective governance of ocean and land use is crucial. This ranges from preserving ecosystems and restoring degraded land, to removing harmful fishing subsidies and closing at least 10% of marine areas to fishing, including the high seas to create fish banks.

Limitations

The global systems shift requires advances in technology and relies on interconnected knowledge about human health, diet, environmental sustainability. However, knowledge in these fields is continuously evolving, uncertain, and often depends on estimates, challenging many studies on a methodological level. Further, the described changes necessitate intense global collaboration and commitment alongside immediate changes of structural systems that are often hindered by political lobbyism from large agro-industries such as sugar and red meat production.


Sources

Willett, W., Rockström, J., Loken, B., Springmann, M., Lang, T., Vermeulen, S., Garnett, T., Tilman, D., DeClerck, F., Wood, A. and Jonell, M., (2019). Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. The Lancet.

The Guardian. (2019). Can we Ditch Intensive Farming – And Still Feed the World?. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/28/can-we-ditch-intensive-farming-and-still-feed-the-world

Lucas, T., & Horton, R. (2019). The 21st-century great food transformation. The Lancet. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(18)33179-9 

 

Our related work

Natural capital

Climate change