Alternative just pathways for transformative change in the food and biomass supply chains towards goals for nature, climate and people

There is limited understanding of what transformative change towards climate and biodiversity goals might entail in the context of food and biomass systems, and the specific role of justice as a leverage point for transformative change. Competing perspectives on justice lead to different preferences for how food and biomass systems are reshaped, and a deeper understanding of those competing perspectives may foster collaborative action. To address this gap, we developed and quantified three contrasting pathways designed to meet biodiversity, climate and human wellbeing goals through transformative change, but picturing contrasted value perspectives about environmental justice and human-nature relationships.

The three developed pathways, Global Green Innovation (GGI), Global Stewardship Towards Co-Existence (GS), and Needs-Based and Nature-Connected Local Stewardship (LS), involve interventions across multiple domains, coherently linked through assumptions about their dominant values, based on the Nature Futures Framework (NFF) and the Applied Justice Taxonomy and Assessment (AJUST) framework. Key intervention domains include food consumption patterns, food waste and loss strategies, cropland and forest management, conservation and restoration, trade, biomass demand, and climate change mitigation. To capture different alternative value perspectives on human-nature relationships and distributive justice, the pathways are differentiated in terms of distribution of efforts across regions and interventions domains.

The qualitative narratives were quantified and analyzed using the Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM). The GLOBIOM model was expanded to include additional interventions (e.g., more diversified land use practices for cropland and forest management, alternative dietary and food consumption inequality trajectories) and socio-economic and environmental indicators (e.g., human health impact from food consumption, value of production, labor in crop production, multiple driver-response pathways for biodiversity based on the GLOBIO and LC-IMPACT biodiversity models).

We will introduce the new pathways, and analyze the quantitative projections of socio-economic and environmental impacts from 2020 to 2050, with a focus on how the pathways differ in terms of their implied distribution of impacts across supply chain actors (e.g., consumers, livestock vs crop producers) and world regions, and in terms of trade-offs between socio-economic and environmental impacts.