Sustainable Food Systems

Our current farming and food systems face the challenge of adapting to climate change, whilst ensuring food security, maintaining livelihoods, ensuring vibrant local communities, and providing ecosystem services and natural resources such as clean water, biomass, and rural landscapes.

Nature-based solutions provide opportunities for a transformation of our food systems and help tackle some of our most pressing societal and environmental challenges.

Many sustainable agricultural systems and practices match the nature-based solutions approach and place biodiversity at the core of the theoretical basis of the farming approach, both preserving and enhancing it. At the same time, these approaches focus on achieving societal and economic benefits for both the producers and the community.

Farming systems that are widely understood to be nature based solutions include:

Sustainable agriculture practices common to these systems include:

Crop rotation, cover and companion cropping, intercropping
Sustainable soil management (for example, no or minimal tillage, green manure, composting)
Integrated pest and crop management and reduced or no use of synthetic pesticides and fertilisers
Lower livestock densities, free range and managed grazing
Restoration and inclusion of landscape elements such as hedgerows and flower strips on farmlands to boost biodiversity and ecosystem services

Farming approaches that can also align with an NbS approach include

Agroforestry (for example, introducing trees into arable fields – silvo-arable – or introducing trees on pasture – silvo-pastoral)
Mixed crop and livestock farming (achieving synergies and nutrient balancing)
Carbon farming

Transitions to sustainable agriculture can include:

Extensification (for example, reducing livestock numbers and moving livestock from housing to open field production systems)
Diversification (for example, more diverse crop rotations and crop diversity on farm, with associated diversification of farm outputs and markets returning to more mixed crop and livestock farming system)
Ecological intensification

Farmers, policy-makers, environmental organisations, businesses, researchers and the wider public all have a role in promoting sustainable farming practices.

NetworkNature provides:

For national, local and regional policymakers

Policy briefs and recommendations
Forums and roundtables that facilitate collaboration and knowledge exchange to promote NbS policy coherence and effectiveness
knowledge-sharing platforms and guidance including evidence on the cost effectiveness of NbS for sustainable food systems
Capacity-building tools and links to relevant advisory services and initiatives, helping connect users with additional support

For practitioners in food systems

Case study libraries that showcase NbS delivering measurable benefits
Guides and training materials that help translate EU policy into actionable NbS project design and monitoring approaches
Accessible facts and figures

Resources

Common agricultural policy

Launched in 1962, the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP) is a partnership between agriculture and society, and between Europe and its farmers.

Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience

As the extreme weather and climate-related hazards intensify, the risk of wildfires is increasing across Europe. The conditions that heighten the fire risk are set to increase with climate change, notably heat and humidity of ecosystems, including soils. Healthy soils with functional water retention capacity also support healthy forest ecosystems that are more resilient to wildfires. At the same time, wildfires can cause soil degradation, leading to increased risks of soil erosion, landslides and floods. Strengthening the knowledge base on soils can contribute to improving disaster risk assessments that recognise the multi-faceted roles that soils play in mitigating disasters. Measures to strengthen soil health build resilience to future stress brought on by climate change.

A Farm to Fork Strategy

The Farm to Fork Strategy, is an overarching planning instrument that aims at transforming food systems at various levels, from soil health to citizen consumption.