“One of the novel ideas we've incorporated in our study is that we mapped out our results on a broad spatial scale, ranging from the municipal level up to the global level," says lead author Prajal Pradhan. “We have identified the lowest possible administrative level on which a region could achieve food self-sufficiency.” Aside from the basic food calorie consumption, the study also analyzes how other factors could affect the projections, such as changes in dietary composition as well as the effects of climate change and urbanization.
The study suggests that both reducing food waste and closing crop yield gaps could increase the total number of food self-sufficient people on all levels worldwide. However, increasing crop yield output may also be impractical in some regions due to local limitations of resources such as water and the subsequent need for cropland expansion.
"This leads to the questions: How can crop yields in those regions be increased in a more sustainable manner and how can consumers be encouraged to engage in more sustainable consumption patterns?" says Jürgen Kropp, deputy chair of PIK research domain Climate Impacts and Vulnerabilities. "These issues require further research but this study sheds light on which measures may be necessary to eventually achieve global food security. Combining this with other previous work, we can now provide a regionalized and consumption-based emission projection for the food sector."
Article: Pradhan, P., Lüdeke, M. K. B., Reusser, D. E., & Kropp, J. P. (2014). Food self-sufficiency across scales: How local can we go? Environmental Science and Technology, 48(16), 9463-9470 [DOI: 10.1021/es5005939].
Weblink to the article: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es5005939
