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The terms ‘Nordic countries’ or ‘The Nordics’ include the five countries Denmark, Finland, Island, Norway, and Sweden. This review includes evaluation of the Nordic countries against Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO)/World Health Organizations’ (WHO) guiding principles for healthy, sustainable diets with respect to environmental impact (principles #9 – #13) and sociocultural aspects (principles #14 – #16). A food systems perspective is taken to summarize and discuss the most important challenges and opportunities for achieving sustainable diets. Food system, food security, self-sufficiency, and resilience perspectives are applied. The information can underpin decisions when developing and implementing Food Based Dietary Guidelines (FBDG) in the Nordics. None of the Nordic countries are on track to reach the 2030 UN climate and biodiversity goals. We describe how food production, processing, and consumption contribute to these and other environmental challenges, and what kinds of dietary changes/transitions consistent with these goals are required. A major challenge is the high production and consumption of meat and too low consumption of fish, vegetables, and fruits. Meat production is a major source of emissions and, together with farmed fish, heavily dependent on imported feed ingredients, leaving a large land-use and water footprint in exporting countries while domestic land resources are not used optimally. Dietary patterns have changed drastically over the past 50 years, and in large parts of the population, meat consumption has doubled since the 1970s, rendering historic food culture less useful as a basis for present-day recommendations. The Nordics have Europe’s lowest use of antibiotics in animal and fish production and have made some progress in reducing food waste along the food chain. A major opportunity is better alignment of food consumption and production based on local or regional production potentials, in conjunction with better and

Agriculture is expected to feed an increasing global population while at the same time meeting demands for renewable energy and the supply of ecosystem services such as provision of nutrient cycling and carbon sequestration. However, the current structure of the agricultural system works against meeting these expectations. The spatial separation of crop and livestock farms has created negative environmental consequences, and bioenergy production has created a trade-off between food and energy production. In this paper, we explore the opportunities for ecological intensification at a regional scale made possible by combining food and energy production. We built three scenarios representing farming systems including biogas production using grass biomass and manure. These scenarios included the following: (a) The current system with energy production (CSE) from non-edible agricultural biomasses (CSE). (b) Agroecological symbiosis (AES) identical to CSE except with 20% of the arable cropping area converted to clover-grasses for use in biogas production. (c) Agroecological symbiosis with livestock (AES-LST) where the available grass biomass (20% as in the AES) is fed to livestock and manure then used as a feedstock in biogas production. In each scenario, nutrients were circulated back to crops in the form of digestate. The supply of soil functions (primary production for food and energy, provision of nutrient cycling, and climate mitigation) and impacts on water quality through nutrient losses in these three scenarios were then compared to the current system. Integrating biogas production into food production resulted in an increased supply of nutrient recycling, reduced nutrient losses, and increased carbon inputs to the soils indicating enhanced climate mitigation. Food production was either not affected (CSE), increased (AES-LST), or decreased (AES), and biogas was produced in substantial quantities in each scenario. Our study demonstrated potential synergies in integ

Critics of modern food systems argue for the need to shift from a consolidated and concentrated, often monoculture based agro-industrial model toward diversified, post-fossil, and nutrient recycling food systems. The abundance of acute and obvious environmental problems in the agricultural sub-systems of the broader food system(s) have resulted in a focus on technological and natural scientific research into “solving” these point of production problems. Yet, there are many facets of food systems that are vital to sustainability which are not addressed even if the environmental problems were solved. In this article, we argue for agroecological symbiosis (AES) as a generic arrangement for re-configuring the primary production of food in agriculture, the processing of food, and development of a food community to work toward system-level sustainability. The guiding principle of this concept was the desire to base farming and food processing on renewable bioenergy, to close nutrient cycles, to break away from the consolidated food chain, to be more transparent and connected with consumers, and to revitalize the rural spaces where farms generally operate. Through a consistent and robust collaboration and co-creative process with transdisciplinary actors, ranging from food producers, and processers to policy actors, we designed a food system model based on networks of AES (NAES). The NAES would form place-based food networks, replacing the consolidated commodity chains. The NAES supports sustainable interactions from a biophysical and socio-cultural perspective. In this paper, we explain the AES concept, give an overview of the process of co-creating the pilot AES, and a proposal for the extension of the AES, as NAES, to create sustainable food systems. Overall, we conclude that the AES model holds potential for creating place-based food systems that further the sustainability agenda.

There is growing demand to produce both food and renewable energy in a sustainable manner, while avoiding competition between food and energy production. In our study, we investigated the potential of harnessing biogas production into nutrient recycling in an integrated system of organic food production and food processing. We used the case of Agroecological Symbiosis (AES) at Palopuro, which is a combination of three farms, a biogas plant, and a bakery, as a case to explore how biogas production using feedstocks from the farms can be used to improve nutrient cycling, and to calculate how much energy could be produced from the within-system feedstocks. The current system (CS) used in organic farms, and the integrated farm and food processing AES system, were analyzed using Substance Flow analysis. In the AES, annual nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) surpluses were projected to be reduced from 95 kg ha−1 to 36 kg ha−1 and from 3.4 kg ha−1 to −0.5 kg ha−1 respectively, compared to the CS. Biogas produced from green manure leys as the major feedstock, produced 2809 MWh a−1. This was 70% more than the energy consumed (1650 MWh a−1) in the systemand thus the AES system turned out to be a net energy producer. Results demonstrated the potential of biogas production to enhance the transition to bioenergy, nutrient recycling, and crop productivity in renewable localized farming and food systems.