Food is a central part of everyday life. It forms the basis of livelihoods, plays a fundamental role in our culture and identity, its prominent in many family traditions and childhood memories, and is essential for human health.

Producing, processing, transporting, buying and selling food products, and the institutions that take part in these activities, form the Food System. The current food system in the UK is frequently described as broken and unsustainable. Food bank use is on the rise despite food being relatively cheap, there’s increases in obesity and malnutrition, concerns with national food security due to a high reliance on imports and high incidences of food waste across the supply chain. These challenges, alongside the ongoing climate emergency, means transformation of the food system is desperately required.

The basis of our food system is land. Whilst playing an integral role in the food system, land is also important for protecting and improving biodiversity, supplying freshwater and many other ecosystem services. The IPCC describe land as having an important role in the climate system, playing a key part in the exchange of energy and water, as well as acting as both a source and a sink of Greenhouse gases (GHGs). The Land use system, and the food system, overlap, most notably during food production activities.

Historic changes in land use are a large contributing factor to climate change, and food and dietary choices are considered a huge driver of these changes. Food production is also a major contributor to both global GHG emissions and environmental degradation. It is claimed that a sustainable food system must be rooted in the wise use of land.

The UK Government has strong aspirations to be a world leader in setting and achieving ambitious net-zero targets. Transformation of land use and food systems presents an opportunity for the UK to meet those ambitious targets, and counteract the detrimental impacts of climate changes, as well as meeting international targets, such as the Paris Agreement for net zero and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as international targets for biodiversity. Such transformation will need to cut across all aspects of the UK food and land use system. Policy teams, at both the UK Government and devolved nation level, have tough decisions to make to ensure policies meet the collective net-zero and well-being goals.

The Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land-Use, and Energy (FABLE) Consortium aims to understand how countries can transition towards sustainable land-use and food systems, and how countries can collectively meet associated SDGs and the objectives of the Paris Agreement. The UK FABLE team have derived a set of pathways for transformation of food and land use systems to 2050. However, FABLE has not considered how these pathways may be delivered sub-nationally or through changes in the spatial distribution of land resources at different spatial resolutions.

My PhD is investigating this gap by exploring the plausibility of national scale pathways to sustainable land use and food systems through consideration of the spatial structure of the nation, utilising the work of the FABLE Consortium.

The first phase will build on the UK-specific version of the FABLE Calculator (a simplified, non-spatial, integrated land-use change model) to explore different policy targets of the devolved nations, and how these differences alter pathways and outcomes. The first phase of the work will guide the spatially explicit model development in the second phase of the PhD, where through using geostatistical methods the plausibility of pathways will be tested against land constraints of the devolved nations.

It is hoped that this work will coincide with ongoing policy discussions and decision-making surrounding land use and food systems, and offer valuable and appropriate suggested pathways for the devolved nations.

Transformation to sustainable food and land use systems will be extremely beneficial for the UK, through reducing climate impacts, improving national food security and enabling the UK to meet both national and international climate targets. It is vitally important as a leading nation, and host of the COP26, that the UK make the commitments into reality.

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