Food matters: Healthy diets increase the economic and physical feasibility of 1.5°C

28-Mar-2024 - “We find that a more sustainable, flexitarian diet increases the feasibility of the Paris Agreement climate goals in different ways,” says Florian Humpenöder, PIK scientist and co-lead author of the study to be published inScience Advances. “The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions related to ...

Transforming food systems could create multi-trillion dollars of economic benefits every year

Transforming food systems around the world would lead to socio-economic benefits summing up to 5 to 10 trillion USD a year

31-Jan-2024 - Transformingfoodsystems around the world would lead to socio-economic benefits summing up to 5 to 10 trillion USD a year, shows a new global policy report produced by leading economists and scientists of theFoodSystem Economics Commission (FSEC). The most ambitious and comprehensive study ...

Sustainability in the food system: not simply less, but different and better

18-May-2022 - Proponents of a no-growth economy have long argued that economic growth as such is harmful to the environment. Now researchers have shown that curbing growth alone would not make our food system sustainable - but changing our diet and putting a price tag on agricultural emissions would. For the ...

Fungi-based meat alternatives to help save Earth’s forests

Green biotechnology needs to be fuelled by green energy

06-May-2022 - Substituting just a fifth of meat from cattle with microbial protein - a meat alternative produced in fermentation tanks - by 2050 could halve deforestation, a new analysis by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) now published in Nature finds. The market-ready meat alternative ...

Forests, food, pandemics and the extinction of species: research network publishes "10 Must Knows" on biodiversity

28-Mar-2022 - "10 Must Knows from Biodiversity Science”, ranging from climate stress for forests to the corona virus that has jumped from animals to humans, are now published for the first time. More than 45 experts from the German Leibniz Research Network Biodiversity and colleagues have compiled this ...

Food crisis due to Ukraine war calls for demand-side action: less animal products, less waste, and greening EU agricultural policy

22-Mar-2022 - The global food system is impacted by the war in Ukraine, adding to the direct humanitarian and security crisis caused by the Russian aggression. Ukraine and Russia are major producers of grains and fertilizers, yet their exports are at risk of getting disrupted. However, agricultural ...

China’s crops at risk: Climate change boosts spread of crop pests and diseases

13-Dec-2021 - Based on a unique, previously unpublished data set ranging from 1970 to 2016, an international team including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) compared long-term statistical records about pest and disease occurrence in China with potential climatic driving factors – such as ...

Climate change is making it harder to get a good cup of coffee

16-Apr-2021 - Ethiopia may produce less specialty coffee and more rather bland tasting varieties in the future. This is the result of a new study by an international team of researchers that looked at the peculiar effects climate change has on Africa's largest coffee producing nation. Their results are ...

Protein supply of the future - Healthy and climate-friendly

Valuable protein alternatives have hardly been exploited to date

22-Jun-2020 - Pulses from domestic arable land, fish from sustainable aquaculture and insects from professional breeding systems offer great potential to meet the protein requirements of the future in a way that is both healthy and climate-friendly. Nevertheless, valuable protein alternatives have so far ...

Food System Innovation – and how to get there

From artificial meat to fine-tuning photosynthesis

20-May-2020 - Food production has always shaped the lives of humans and the surface of the Earth. Be it plough or refrigerator, time and again innovations have transformed the ways we grow, process, and consume food over the last millennia. Today, with almost 40 per cent of all land on Earth used for food ...