Advancing food system sustainability: multi-systems integration and emerging knowledge gaps

Compound climate- and non-climate-related events exert tremendous pressure on food systems, yet the complex environmental-human-societal mechanisms remain unclear. Given the complexities of interlinkages in food systems, impacts may be exacerbated when feedback loops magnify through vicious cycles. To meet future food demands, increase production stability, minimize environmental impacts, and adapt to socio-ecological fluctuations, a complete metacoupling framework is suggested to identify hotspots of climate sensitivity, flows, and related feedback in order to develop co-benefit solutions that optimize food availability and promote climate resilience by leveraging advanced technologies and collaborative efforts. This framework should revisit the supply chain activities, drivers, stakeholders, and feedback, thus helping detect hidden socioecological tradeoffs and synergies phenomena. This perspective identifies the agrarian production-consumer-research extension (PCR) nexus as a fundamental tool to enable the development of coherent and sustainable policies in food production, processing, distribution, consumption, storing, and disposing or recycling, which will ultimately lead to long-term sustainable and resilient food systems.