McDermid Sonali Shukla, Hayek Matthew, Jamieson Dale W, Hale Galina, Kanter David
Department of Environmental Studies, New York University, New York, NY USA.
Department of Economics, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA USA.
Clim Change. 2023;176(4):41. doi: 10.1007/s10584-023-03507-2. Epub 2023 Apr 5.
The global food system, and animal agriculture in particular, is a major and growing contributor to climate change, land system change, biodiversity loss, water consumption and contamination, and environmental pollution. The copious production and consumption of animal products are also contributing to increasingly negative public health outcomes, particularly in wealthy and rapidly industrializing countries, and result in the slaughter of trillions of animals each year. These impacts are motivating calls for reduced reliance on animal-based products and increased use of replacement plant-based products. However, our understanding of how the production and consumption of animal products, as well as plant-based alternatives, interact with important dimensions of human and environment systems is incomplete across space and time. This inhibits comprehensively envisioning global and regional food system transitions and planning to manage the costs and synergies thereof. We therefore propose a cross-disciplinary research agenda on future target-based scenarios for food system transformation that has at its core three main activities: (1) data collection and analysis at the intersection of animal agriculture, the environment, and societal well-being, (2) the construction of target-based scenarios for animal products informed by these new data and empirical understandings, and (3) the evaluation of impacts, unintended consequences, co-benefits, and trade-offs of these target-based scenarios to help inform decision-making.
全球粮食系统，尤其是畜牧业，是气候变化、土地系统变化、生物多样性丧失、水资源消耗与污染以及环境污染的主要且不断增加的促成因素。动物产品的大量生产和消费也导致了日益负面的公共卫生后果，尤其是在富裕和快速工业化的国家，并且每年导致数万亿只动物被屠宰。这些影响促使人们呼吁减少对动物源性产品的依赖，并增加对替代性植物性产品的使用。然而，我们对于动物产品以及植物性替代品的生产和消费如何在时空维度上与人类和环境系统的重要方面相互作用的理解并不完整。这阻碍了全面设想全球和区域粮食系统转型以及规划管理其成本和协同效应。因此，我们提出了一个关于未来基于目标情景的粮食系统转型的跨学科研究议程，其核心包括三项主要活动：（1）在畜牧业、环境和社会福祉的交叉点进行数据收集与分析；（2）根据这些新数据和实证认识构建动物产品的基于目标情景；（3）评估这些基于目标情景的影响、意外后果、共同效益和权衡取舍，以帮助为决策提供信息。
