Publications

Coste, M., Pereira, L., Charman, A., Petersen, L., Hawkes, C. 2022. ‘Hampers’ as an effective strategy to shift towards sustainable diets in South African low-income communities. Development Southern Africa. https://doi.org/10.1080/0376835X.2022.2028605

Transitioning towards sustainable diets is imperative to avoid the worst effects of climate change, environmental degradation, and malnutrition. In South Africa, households most vulnerable to food insecurity employ various strategies to access food. These include purchasing hampers; a combination of staple foods sold in bulk at a discounted price, which are cake wheat flour, super maize meal, white sugar, cooking oil, and whit...

Resare Sahlin, K., Trewern, J. 2022. A systematic review of the definitions and interpretations in scientific literature of ‘less but better’ meat in high-income settings. Nature Food. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00536-5

‘Less but better’ is a pragmatic approach to tackling the sustainability challenges of meat consumption and production. Definitions of ‘less’ and ‘better’ lack clarity. Here we explore interpretations of these concepts, finding increasing use of ‘less but better’ in the literature from Western, high-income settings. Despite discrepancies among interpretations of ‘less’ meat, existing quantifications indicate that significant r...

Resare Sahlin, K., Carolus, J., von Greyerz, K., Ekqvist, I., Röös, E. 2022. Delivering “less but better” meat in practice—a case study of a farm in agroecological transition. Agronomy for Sustainable Development. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13593-021-00737-5

Eating “less but better” meat can be a strategy to guide meat consumption in Western or high-income countries towards sustainability, but what “better” means depends on the perspective. Multiple studies and reports suggest that agroecological farming systems could contribute to a broad range of sustainability benefits, but few studies have examined the implications for people and nature following trade-offs between sustainabil...

Lam, D., Jiménez-Aceituno, A., Guerrero Lara, L., Sellberg, M., Norström, A., Moore, M., Peterson, G., Olsson, P. 2022. Amplifying actions for food system transformation: insights from the Stockholm region. Sustainability Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01154-7

Food is essential to people and is one of the main ways in which people are connected to the world’s ecosystems. However, food systems often cause ecosystem degradation and produce ill-health, which has generated increasing calls to transform food systems to be more sustainable. The Swedish food system is currently undergoing substantial change. A varied set of local actors have created alternative sustainability initiatives t...

Sellberg, M., Norrby, J., Nowak, A., Rönnquist, L., Olsson, P., Peterson, G., Alvsilver, A. 2022. Rapid Transition Lab - Navigating transformations in times of crises towards healthy, sustainable and just Swedish and planetary food systems. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Dark Matter Labs, and Vinnova. https://doi.org/10.17045/sthlmuni.21275946.v1

The centrality of food to human flourishing combined with how food is currently a source of many social and environmental problems means that many of the broader sustainability challenges can be addressed by fundamental changes to the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Such changes are central to what has been referred to as food system transformations. Transformations require significant changes in multiple di...

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...