Publications

Wood A, Halloran A, Gordon L J.2020. Insight paper #2 of the Nordic food system transformation series: Eight opportunities for Nordic collaboration on food system challenges. Stockholm Resilience Centre; Stockholm

This second Insight Paper of the Nordic food system transformation series takes a Nordic perspective to food system challenges. Eight urgent food system challenges shared across Nordic countries are described that represent opportunities for regional collaboration. The benefits of Nordic collaboration on food systems are discussed, while acknowledging that not all food system issues are ‘Nordic’ in nature. Insight paper #1 ...

Wood A, Halloran A, Gordon L J.2020. Insight paper #1 of the Nordic food systemtransformation series: Towards sustainable Nordic foodsystems – project

This first installment of the Nordic food system transformation series introduces the project Towards sustainable Nordic food systems. The project aims to bring together policymakers and food system actors to explore‘what’s next’ when it comes to sustainable Nordic food systems. This Insight Paper explores the motivation for the project and details the process used to gain insights from stakeholders across the Nordic region re...

Kummu, M., Kinnunen, P., Lehikoinen, E., Porkka, M., Queiroz, C., Röös, E., Troell, M., Weil. C. 2020. Interplay of trade and food system resilience: Gains on supply diversity over time at the cost of trade independency. Global Food Security, Volume 24, March 2020, 100360

Rapidly increasing international food trade has drastically altered the global food system over the past decades. Using national scale indicators, we assess two of the resilience principles that directly reflect the effects of global trade on food systems – namely, maintaining diversity and redundancy, and managing connectivity. We perform our analysis for four nutritional components: dietary energy, proteins, fat, and quanti...

Wood, A., Gordon, L.J., Röös, E., Karlsson, J.O., Häyhä, T., Bignet, V., Rydenstam, T., Hård af Segerstad, L., Bruckner, M. 2019. Nordic food systems for improved health and sustainability: baseline assessment to inform transformation. Stockholm Resilience Centre; Stockholm.

Nordic countries can be a perfect leader in making the global food system healthier and more sustainable, but so far they are falling short on several dietary, health and environmental goals. Current diets in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland* are contributing both to public health problems and a range of environmental impacts. About half the population is overweight, meat consumption is at least 4.5 times in excess of EAT-...

Sellberg, M.M., Norström, A.V., Peterson, G.P., Gordon. L.J. 2020. Using local initiatives to envision sustainable and resilient food systems in the Stockholm city-region. Global Food Security 24.

Globally, food systems face multifaceted sustainability challenges and the need for food system transformation is increasingly acknowledged. However, there is still a lack of knowledge on the pathways for transformation and how they will play out in diverse regional social-ecological contexts. We explored transformation towards more sustainable and resilient food systems in a specific regional context – the Stockholm city-regi...

Nyström, J.-B. Jouffray, A. V. Norström, B. Crona, P. Søgaard-Jørgensen, S. R. Carpenter, Ö. Bodin, V. Galaz, C. Folke. 2019. Anatomy and resilience of the global production ecosystem. Nature, Volume 575, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1712-3

Much of the Earth’s biosphere has been appropriated for the production of harvestable biomass in the form of food, fuel and fibre. Here we show that the simplification and intensification of these systems and their growing connection to international markets has yielded a global production ecosystem that is homogenous, highly connected and characterized by weakened internal feedbacks. We argue that these features converge to y...

Willett, W., Rockström, J., Loken, B., Springmann, M., et.al. 2019. Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. EAT-Lancet EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4

Food systems have the potential to nurture human health and support environmental sustainability; however, they are currently threatening both. Providing a growing global population with healthy diets from sustainable food systems is an immediate challenge. Although global food production of calories has kept pace with population growth, more than 820 million people have insufficient food and many more consume low-quality diet...

Gordon, L., Bignet, V., Crona, B. et.al. 2017. Rewiring food systems to enhance human health and biosphere stewardship. Environ. Res. Lett. 12 100201

Food lies at the heart of both health and sustainability challenges. We use a social-ecological framework to illustrate how major changes to the volume, nutrition and safety of food systems between 1961 and today impact health and sustainability. These changes have almost halved undernutrition while doubling the proportion who are overweight. They have also resulted in reduced resilience of the biosphere, pushing four out of s...

Österblom, H., Jouffray, J.-B., Folke, C., Rockström, J. 2017. Emergence of a global science-business initiative for ocean stewardship. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA.

The ocean is under considerable pressure originating from diverse human activities on land and in the water. While substantial literature has focused on how science interacts with policy, relatively little is known about interactions between science and business. Here, we describe: ( i ) the process of identifying “keystone actors” in marine ecosystems, namely globally operating corporations engaged in fisheries and aquacultu...

Troell, M., R.L. Naylor, M. Metian, M. Beveridge, P.H. Tyedmers, C. Folke, K.J. Arrow, S. Barrett, A.-S. Crépin, P.R. Ehrlich, Å. Gren, N. Kautsky, S.A. Levin, K. Nyborg, H. Österblom, S. Polasky, M. Scheffer, B.H. Walker, T. Xepapadeas, A.J. de Zeeuw 2014. Does Aquaculture Add Resilience to the Global Food System?. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, epub, DOI:10.1073/pnas.1404067111

Aquaculture is the fastest growing food sector and continues to expand alongside terrestrial crop and livestock production. Using portfolio theory as a conceptual framework, we explore how current interconnections between the aquaculture, crop, livestock, and fisheries sectors act as an impediment to, or an opportunity for, enhanced resilience in the global food system given increased resource scarcity and climate change. A...