Food Systems, Climate Change, and Nutritional Security in the 21st Century

The global food system of the 21st century is at a serious crossroads, growing more stressed by the growing climate change and unable to provide adequate and fair nutritional security of the worldwide population. Although the global food production has grown since the Green Revolution, this agricultural growth has been achieved at the expense of environmental degradation, diets of homogeneity, and aggravation of micronutrient deficiencies due to increasing atmospheric CO2, extreme weather and agroclimatic changes. The traditional measures of food security which are narrowly pegged on the sufficiency of calories overlooks the ever-increasing plight of the hidden hunger and diet-related noncommunicable diseases, which are both rising in the stress of climatic conditions. The review is critical because it is practicalized how climate adaptation plans and nutritional outcomes have become structurally disengaged by showing how techno-optimistic solutions have a tendency to ignore equity, cultural foodways, and metabolic well-being. We build an integrative strategy that places nutritional security as more of a downstream delivery as a design need of climate-resilient food systems. Based on the new evidence of the biogeochemistry, digital agrifood governance, marine micronutrient ecology, and circular metabolism, and epigenetic nutrition, we recognize five transformative pathways that redistribute justice, biological complexity, and intergenerational wellbeing. Such a policy move of decoupling the quantity of food and its quality is challenged in this analysis and it suggests a paradigm shift to food systems, which are capable of feeding people and the planet during a period of climatic uncertainty.