While some conceptual and theoretical advances in defining food systems and their related indicators and metrics have shed light on these complex dynamics 9, researchers and analysts are still struggling with one basic question: How can we define and empirically measure food systems’ sustainability? Attempts to address this question add insight 10, 11 but several conceptual or methodological challenges limit the overall utility of those efforts: Worldwide, those trends are correlated with a massive environmental ‘food print’ of the food production and distribution sectors 6, 7, coupled with patterns of food utilization characterized by concerning levels of waste and with supply chains that are increasingly homogenous and prone to crowding-out of smaller agri-food operators 8. At the same time, the health consequences of the exponential increase in overweight and obese people are becoming another global burden 4, 5. In 2016 the total number of chronically undernourished people was estimated to be around 815 million (more than one person out of ten) 1. Meeting increasing demand for nutritious food for a growing global population under climatic pressures, while mitigating associated environmental damages, is already a pressing challenge 1, 3. The sustainability scores obtained for each country are made available over the entire range of indicators.Īddressing the question of the (un)sustainability of our food systems is critical as the world is bracing for hard-choice challenges and potentially massive trade-offs around issues related to food quality and food security in the coming decades 1, 2. The process results in the computation of a global sustainability map covering 97 countries and 20 indicators. The paper shows how the availability of data (or lack therefore) results in an unavoidable trade-off between number of indicators and number of countries, and highlights how optimization can be used to present the most robust metric possible given the existence of this trade-offs in the data space. An aggregate sustainability score was then computed based on those 27 indicators organized into four dimensions: environment, social, food security & nutrition and economic. A rigorous inclusion/exclusion protocol was then used to refine the list and shorten it to a sub-set of 27 indicators. The choice of the metric dimensions, as well as the individual indicators included in the metric, were initially identified from a thorough review of the existing literature. This paper presents the first global map of food systems sustainability based on a rigorous protocol.

State level food system indicators