Learning from the future: mainstreaming disruptive solutions for the transition to sustainable food systems

摘要: Keeping the food system within environmental limits (Springmann et al 2018), specifically reversing the food system-driven transgression of the planetary boundaries of land, water, biodiversity, nutrient loading, and climate change (Rockström et al 2020), requires novel approaches for envisaging and realizing radically progressive yet attainable futures. Scenario building, supported by quantitative models or qualitative scenario narratives, is useful to explore the tangible consequences of different courses of action in a pragmatic and useful way for food and climate policy, as exemplified by the CAPRI (Common Agricultural Policy Regionalised Impact) models (European Commission 2011) and explorations of future land use in the face of climate change (eg Gomes et al 2020) However, modelbased scenarios are typically built, parameterized and calibrated using a limited number of drivers of change (eg population growth, commodity prices)(Raudsepp-Hearne et al 2020) and known relationships between those drivers (eg the trade-offs and synergies between the delivery of commodities and public goods)(Verburg et al 2008, De Vries et al 2013, O’Neill et al 2014, Gomes et al 2020)(figure 1). Elements of the global food system that are either more distal or inherently more difficult to model quantitatively (eg different forms of governance) are commonly considered out of scope or are assumed, explicitly or implicitly, to be constant. Such scenario analyses are therefore confined to new permutations and combinations of drivers and interventions within the terra cognita of the known solution space and as such cannot account for disruptive solutions …