Assessing Sustainable Nutrition Security: Including Fruits and Vegetables.

The world’s food systems face an escalating challenge to meet accelerating demand for sustainably-produced, nutritious food in the face of multiple threats, including human population pressure, dwindling resources, and degraded ecosystems. About 1 billion people lack sufficient food and about 2 billion people suffer from a number of micronutrient deficiencies. Paradoxically, more than 2 billion adults are overweight, of which approximately 500 million are obese. These stark current challenges to food security are even more ominous in the face of on-going climate change, via both the direct effects of extreme weather on food production and access, as well as the many indirect effects (e.g. pests, disease, damages to infrastructure, etc.).

It is clear that actions are needed, but how can we reliably choose the path forward with the best overall outcomes, considering both human nutritional needs and sustainability requirements? The ILSI Research Foundation has assembled a broad group of public- and private-sector scientists to begin answering this question. They developed a novel set of metrics intended to quantify the role of food systems in providing for “sustainable nutrition security” (SNS). However, one of the key obstacles to applying these metrics is the lack of modeling approaches for quantifying climate and water system impacts on fruits and vegetables. Accordingly, the ILSI Research Foundation has recently launched a new partnership to begin including fruits and vegetables in the SNS assessment work. The task is especially challenging given the lesser attention that these crops have received from the modeling community – relative to staple crops. It is envisioned as an 18-month project, starting in July 2015. An update will be given on the specific crops included, preferred modeling methods, and sources of relevant data, as well as plans to integrate the new findings into future IPCC and US National Climate Assessment activities.