Jessica Fanzo

Johns Hopkins University | JHU · Berman Institute of Bioethics and School of Advanced International Studies

The relationship of the United States (U.S.) agrifood sector to climate change is bidirectional; cattle production for beef consumption generates methane and nitrous oxide, both of which are potent greenhouse gases (GHGs). These gases contribute to global warming which in turn increase the frequency and strength of adverse catastrophic events, whic...

Although the global food system increasingly is viewed as unsustainable for human and planetary health, the policy pathways for transforming the status quo are often highly contentious. This book brings together inter-disciplinary scholars to analyze the political economy dynamics central to food system transformation and to identify pathways for e...

The ability of food systems to feed the world’s population will continue to be constrained in the face of global warming and other global challenges. Often missing from the literature on future food security are different scenarios of population growth. Also, most climate models use given population projections and consider neither major increases...

Mongolia's projected warming is far above the global average and could exceed 5 • C by the end of the century. The reliance on pastoral livestock and rainfed agriculture along with its fragile ecosystems put Mongolia's economy at risk of adverse climate change impacts, particularly from climate extreme events. Eighty percent of Mongolia's agricultu...

Using group model building we developed a series of causal loop diagrams identifying the environmental impacts of ultra-processed food (UPF) systems, and underlying system drivers, which was subsequently validated against the peer-reviewed literature. The final conceptual model displays the commercial, biological and social drivers of the UPF syste...

Mongolia is severely affected by adverse climate change impacts. A better and more comprehensive understanding of the linkages between climate change and nutrition is key to developing effective interventions to ensure that Mongolia’s population has access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food despite adverse climate outcomes.

Translating agricultural productivity into food availability depends on food supply chains. Agricultural policy and research efforts promote increased horticultural crop production and yields, but the ability of low-resource food supply chains to handle increased volumes of perishable crops is not well understood. This study developed and used a di...

Aquaculture is among the most dynamic sectors in the global food system, yet it remains surprisingly under-represented in the mainstream literature on food policy. This article reviews 204 published articles and reports and shows that government policies have strongly influenced the geographic distribution of aquaculture growth, as well as the type...

The unprecedented economic and health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have shown the global necessity of mitigating the underlying drivers of zoonotic spillover events, which occur at the human-wildlife and domesticated animal interface. Spillover events are associated to varying degrees with high habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss through l...

With climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and ongoing conflicts, food systems and the diets they produce are facing increasing fragility. In a turbulent, hot world, threatened resiliency and sustainability of food systems could make it all the more complicated to nourish a population of 9.7 billion by 2050. Climate change is having adverse impact...

Achieving food security for the global population of 8 billion will be a challenge without functional, equitable, and resilient food systems. This chapter examines the history of how food security has been framed and addressed in international development, and the importance of a food systems approach and mindset in tackling food security. While th...

Transforming food systems is essential to bring about a healthier, equitable, sustainable, and resilient future, including achieving global development and sustainability goals. To date, no comprehensive framework exists to track food systems transformation and their contributions to global goals. In 2021, the Food Systems Countdown to 2030 Initiat...

Unhealthy diets are a major contributor to the global burden of disease, and food systems cause substantial environmental destruction. To lay out how to achieve healthy diets for all, within planetary boundaries, the landmark EAT–Lancet Commission proposed the planetary health diet, which includes a range of possible intakes by food group and subst...

Blue foods, sourced in aquatic environments, are important for the economies, livelihoods, nutritional security and cultures of people in many nations. They are often nutrient rich¹, generate lower emissions and impacts on land and water than many terrestrial meats², and contribute to the health³, wellbeing and livelihoods of many rural communities...

Rivers are critical, but often overlooked, parts of food systems. They have multiple functions that support the food security, nutrition, health and livelihoods of the communities surrounding them. However, given current unsustainable food system practices, damming and climate change, the majority of the world’s largest rivers are increasingly susc...

Tightly controlled water homeostasis in the human body is essential for optimal health. A recent study by Yamada and colleagues in Science shows that biological and environmental factors impact human water turnover, providing insight into potential water insecurity among specific populations in the context of global challenges, including climate ch...

Livestock are a critically important component of the food system, although the sector needs a profound transformation to ensure that it contributes to a rapid transition towards sustainable food systems. This chapter reviews and synthesises the evidence available on changes in demand for livestock products in the last few decades, and the multiple...

Blue foods play a central role in food and nutrition security for billions of people and are a cornerstone of the livelihoods, economies, and cultures of many coastal and riparian communities. Blue foods are extraordinarily diverse, are often rich in essential micronutrients and fatty acids, and can be produced in ways that are more environmentally...

Ensuring sustainable food systems requires vastly reducing their environmental and health costs while making healthy and sustainable food affordable to all. One of the central problems of current food systems is that many of the costs of harmful foods are externalized, i.e., are not reflected in market prices. At the same time, the benefits of heal...

Building on an extensive review of the literature and expert elicitation using group model building, we developed a series of causal loop diagrams identifying the environmental impacts of ultra-processed food (UPF) systems, and underlying system drivers. The final conceptual model displays the commercial, biological and social drivers of the UPF sy...

Many indigenous foods are nutrient-rich but are often underutilized even among populations at high risk of malnutrition. The aims of this study were to conduct value chain analysis of one cultivated crop (finger millet among the Munda tribe) and one wild green leafy vegetable (Koinaar leaves among the Sauria Paharia tribe) of two Indigenous communi...

Injustices are prevalent in food systems, where the accumulation of vast wealth is possible for a few, yet one in ten people remain hungry. Here, for 194 countries we combine aquatic food production, distribution and consumption data with corresponding national policy documents and, drawing on theories of social justice, explore whether barriers to...

Sheryl L Hendriks and colleagues describe the global risks and vulnerabilities associated with health, food security, and nutrition

Projections of future food security require careful interpretation because they are often based on models that include only a subset of biophysical variables and have inherent uncertainties, caution Samuel Myers and colleagues

Over the past 50 years, food systems worldwide have shifted from predominantly rural to industrialized and consolidated systems, with impacts on diets, nutrition and health, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability. We explore the potential for sustainable and equitable food system transformation (ideal state of change) by comparing countries...

Background: Indigenous people globally experience poor nutrition outcomes, with women facing the greater burden. Munda, a predominant tribe in Jharkhand, India, live in a biodiverse food environment but yet have high levels of malnutrition. Objectives: To assess diets and the nutritional status of Munda tribal women and explore associations with th...

Understanding and communicating the environmental impacts of food products is key to enabling transitions to environmentally sustainable food systems [El Bilali and Allahyari, Inf. Process. Agric. 5, 456–464 (2018)]. While previous analyses compared the impacts of food commodities such as fruits, wheat, and beef [Poore and Nemecek, Science 360, 987...

Background Slowing climate change is crucial to the future wellbeing of human societies and the greater environment. Current beef production systems in the USA are a major source of negative environmental impacts and raise various animal welfare concerns. Nevertheless, beef production provides a food source high in protein and many nutrients as wel...

To reorient food systems to ensure they deliver healthy diets that protect against multiple forms of malnutrition and diet-related disease and safeguard the environment, ecosystems, and natural resources, there is a need for better governance and accountability. However, decision-makers are often in the dark on how to navigate their food systems to...

This paper argues that individuals in many high-income countries typically have moral reasons to limit their beef consumption and consume plant-based protein instead, given the negative effects of beef production and consumption. Beef production is a significant source of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts, high l...

Blue foods play a central role in food and nutrition security for billions of people and are a cornerstone of the livelihoods, economies, and cultures of many coastal and riparian communities. Blue foods are extraordinarily diverse, are often rich in essential micronutrients and fatty acids, and can often be produced in ways that are more environme...

Food environments are a critical point for reorienting the food system towards sustainable diets, as they are directly where consumers make decisions about which foods to acquire. Using global data, we examined shifts in food environments, and the availability, affordability, convenience, and quality of foods within them, over time on the basis of...

Despite representing a growing element of the international community’s discourse, the sustainability of food systems and the challenge of its empirical measurement are still highly debated. In this paper, we propose to address this gap by computing a global food system sustainability index which we then use in a cross-country analysis covering 94...

There is widespread agreement among experts that a fundamental reorientation of global, regional, national and local food systems is needed to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals Agenda and address the linked challenges of undernutrition, obesity and climate change described as the Global Syndemic. Recognising the urgency of this imperativ...

Background: Little is known about the current intake of sustainable diets globally and specifically in middle-income countries, considering nutritional, environmental and economic factors. Objective: To assess and characterize the sustainability of Mexican diets and their association with sociodemographic factors. Design: Dietary data of 2,438 adul...

Because AFSs are diverse, dynamic, and evolve continuously, they require massive continuous investment to enable ongoing discovery and adaptation merely to prevent backsliding.

So how do we reverse the growing carbon, land, and toxic chemical footprint of contemporary AVCs; expand the nutrient-rich food supply; and induce more equitable, inclusive, healthier food environments—and thus consumption patterns—so as to navigate from today’s unsustainable and precarious AVCs to a warmer, more urban, more African, and shock-pron...

As we look 25–50 years, or more, into the future, we must also keep in mind how very different tomorrow’s world will inevitably look. Three big, inevitable changes stand out, with serious implications for AFS and AVC innovations.

The complex pathways from innovation to impact mean that unintended spilloverSpillovers effects on non-target objectives are always likely. This generates a third reason—in addition to accelerators and complementarity in pursuit of target objectives—why socio-technical bundlesBundle/bundling are important. Herrero et al. (2020, 2021) demonstrated t...

Scientific discovery is neither linear nor predictable. The time it takes to develop breakthrough technologies varies enormously among application domains. Some basic scientific discoveries remain elusive and will need continued, concerted funding and attention in the years and decades ahead. In some cases, the stumbling block is the scientific adv...

Technological and institutional innovationsin agri-food systems (AFSs) over the past century have brought dramatic advances in human well-being worldwide.

A key implication of the abundance of promising technologies in various stages of development is that AFS transformation is less likely to be limited by science-based discovery than by human agency . What key players do in response to the wealth of options they face will ultimately determine the path(s) we follow.

Repeated episodes throughout history remind us that AFSs episodically undergo dramatic transformations, most of them purposeful—guided by incentives prevailing at the time—rather than purely random changes. Typically, these changes have taken decades or centuries. A major shock, like the COVID-19 pandemic, may help spark the more rapid transformati...

One might reasonably invoke Dickens in describing AFSs and AVCs today: “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

As detailed in Marshall et al. (Quinn Marshall, Jessica Fanzo, Christopher B. Barrett, Andrew D. Jones, Anna Herforth, and Rebecca McLaren, “Building a global food systems typology: A new tool for reducing complexity in food systems analysis,” Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, vol. 5 (November 2021): 746512), the food systemsFoodsystemstypolog...

Addressing overconsumption of protein-rich foods from high ecological footprint sources can have positive impacts on health such as reduction of non-communicable disease risk and protecting the natural environment. With the increased attention towards development of ecologically sustainable diets, this systematic review aimed to critically review l...

Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion enables professionals, scholars, and students engaged with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to develop a richer understanding of the legacies and historical complexities of the policy fields behind each goal. Each of the 17 chapters tells the decades or centuries-old backst...

The world must ambitiously curtail greenhouse gas emissions to achieve climate stability. The literature often supposes that a low-carbon future will depend on a mix of technological innovation—improving the performance of new technologies and systems—as well as more sustainable behaviours such as travelling less or reducing waste. To what extent a...

Sustainable food systems require the integration of and alignment between recommendations for food and land use practices, as well as an understanding of the political economy context and identification of entry points for change. We propose a food systems transformation framework that takes these elements into account and links long-term goals wit...

Humans, animals, and the environment face a universal crisis: antimicrobial resistance (AR). Addressing AR and its multi-disciplinary causes across many sectors including in human and veterinary medicine remains underdeveloped. One barrier to AR efforts is an inconsistent process to incorporate the plenitude of stakeholders about what AR is and how...

Climate change has multiple negative effects on global public health; reduced quality and quantity of crops result in increased food and financial insecurities leading to malnutrition (undernutrition and obesity) and diet-related non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular diseases. In addition, food systems substantiall...

Food systems have a profound impact on diets, nutrition, health, economic development, and environmental sustainability. Yet their complexity poses a persistent challenge in identifying the policy actions that are needed to improve human and planetary health outcomes. Typologies are a useful classification tool to identify similarities and differen...

Objective The aim of this study was to examine the trade-offs related to the production and consumption of palm oil in Myanmar from a sustainable diets perspective. Design We used an enhanced value chain analysis approach that included semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders; market analyses to assess edible oils in markets and focus grou...

Agriculture systems, which account for a sizable share of global greenhouse gas emissions, are placing a growing burden on the environment while also contributing to increasingly common health problems. Climate change is making the situation worse by reducing agricultural productivity as well as the nutritional content of certain crops, which in tu...

Background Key nutrient deficits remain widespread throughout sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) whereas noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) now cause one-third of deaths. Easy-to-use metrics are needed to track contributions of diet quality to this double burden. Objectives We evaluated comparative performance of a novel food-based Global Diet Quality Score (G...

Food systems that deliver healthy diets without exceeding the planet’s resources are essential to achieve the worlds’ ambitious development goals. Healthy diets need to be safe, accessible, and affordable for all, including for disadvantaged and nutritionally vulnerable groups such as of smallholder producers, traders, and consumers in low- and mid...

Despite contributing to healthy diets for billions of people, aquatic foods are often undervalued as a nutritional solution because their diversity is often reduced to the protein and energy value of a single food type (‘seafood’ or ‘fish’)1–4. Here we create a cohesive model that unites terrestrial foods with nearly 3,000 taxa of aquatic foods to...

Food systems that support healthy diets in sustainable, resilient, just, and equitable ways can engender progress in eradicating poverty and malnutrition; protecting human rights; and restoring natural resources. Food system activities have contributed to great gains for humanity but have also led to significant challenges, including hunger, poor d...

Food systems are at the center of a brewing storm consisting of a rapidly changing climate, rising hunger and malnutrition and significant social inequities. At the same time, there are vast opportunities to ensure that food systems produce healthy and safe food in equitable ways that promote environmental sustainability, especially if the world ca...