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The achievement of several sustainable development goals and the Paris Climate Agreement depends on rapid progress towards sustainable food and land systems in all countries. We have built a flexible, collaborative modeling framework to foster the development of national pathways by local research teams and their integration up to global scale. Local researchers independently customize national models to explore mid-century pathways of the food and land use system transformation in collaboration with stakeholders. An online platform connects the national models, iteratively balances global exports and imports, and aggregates results to the global level. Our results show that actions toward greater sustainability in countries could sum up to 1 Mha net forest gain per year, 950 Mha net gain in the land where natural processes predominate, and an increased CO2 sink of 3.7 GtCO2e yr−1 over the period 2020–2050 compared to current trends, while average food consumption per capita remains above the adequate food requirements in all countries. We show examples of how the global linkage impacts national results and how different assumptions in national pathways impact global results. This modeling setup acknowledges the broad heterogeneity of socio-ecological contexts and the fact that people who live in these different contexts should be empowered to design the future they want. But it also demonstrates to local decision-makers the interconnectedness of our food and land use system and the urgent need for more collaboration to converge local and global priorities.

PR, 1 Fostering Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; IFPRI3; Capacity Strengthening; ISI; DCA, Natural Resources and Resilience (NRR); Transformation Strategies, There is an urgent need for countries to transition their national food and land-use systems toward food and nutritional security, climate stability, and environmental integrity. How can countries satisfy their demands while jointly delivering the required transformative change to achieve global sustainability targets? Here, we present a collaborative approach developed with the FABLE—Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land, and Energy—Consortium to reconcile both global and national elements for developing national food and land-use system pathways. This approach includes three key features: (1) global targets, (2) country-driven multi-objective pathways, and (3) multiple iterations of pathway refinement informed by both national and international impacts. This approach strengthens policy coherence and highlights where greater national and international ambition is needed to achieve global goals (e.g., the SDGs). We discuss how this could be used to support future climate and biodiversity negotiations and what further developments would be needed.

The food and land use sector is a major contributor to India's total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. On one hand, India is committed to sustainability targets in the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sectors, on the other, there is little clarity whether these objectives can align with national developmental priorities of food security and environmental protection. This study fills the gap by reviewing multiple corridors to sustain the AFOLU systems through an integrated assessment framework using partial equilibrium modeling. We create three pathways that combine the shared socio-economic pathways with alternative assumptions on diets and mitigation strategies. We analyze our results of the pathways on key indicators of land-use change, GHG emissions, food security, water withdrawals in agriculture, agricultural trade and production diversity. Our findings indicate that dietary shift, improved efficiency in livestock production systems, lower fertilizer use, and higher yield through sustainable intensification can reduce GHG emissions from the AFOLU sectors up to 80% by 2050. Dietary shifts could help meet EAT-Lancet recommended minimum calorie requirements alongside meeting mitigation ambitions. Further, water withdrawals in agriculture would reduce by half by 2050 in the presence of environmental flow protection and mitigation strategies. We conclude by pointing towards specific cstrategic policy design changes that would be essential to embark on such a sustainable pathway., Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI), Peer Reviewed

To meet the ambitious objectives of biodiversity and climate conventions, the international community requires clarity on how these objectives can be operationalized spatially and how multiple targets can be pursued concurrently. To support goal setting and the implementation of international strategies and action plans, spatial guidance is needed to identify which land areas have the potential to generate the greatest synergies between conserving biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. Here we present results from a joint optimization that minimizes the number of threatened species, maximizes carbon retention and water quality regulation, and ranks terrestrial conservation priorities globally. We found that selecting the top-ranked 30% and 50% of terrestrial land area would conserve respectively 60.7% and 85.3% of the estimated total carbon stock and 66% and 89.8% of all clean water, in addition to meeting conservation targets for 57.9% and 79% of all species considered. Our data and prioritization further suggest that adequately conserving all species considered (vertebrates and plants) would require giving conservation attention to ~70% of the terrestrial land surface. If priority was given to biodiversity only, managing 30% of optimally located land area for conservation may be sufficient to meet conservation targets for 81.3% of the terrestrial plant and vertebrate species considered. Our results provide a global assessment of where land could be optimally managed for conservation. We discuss how such a spatial prioritization framework can support the implementation of the biodiversity and climate conventions.

Resumen: Esta es la cuarta edición del informe anual de los logros por país en relación a los 17 Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible, preparado conjuntamente por Bertelsmann Stiftung y la Red de Soluciones para el Desarrollo Sostenible (SDSN). El informe incluye los 193 Estados miembros de las Naciones Unidas y presenta datos sobre los cambios a lo largo del tiempo en los indicadores de los ODS, así como los cálculos de las trayectorias hasta 2030.

The world has experienced unprecedented growth in average per capita incomes over the last 50 years, but many countries continue to face deep economic, social, and/or environmental challenges. These include persistent extreme poverty, poor outcomes in human health and education, widespread malnutrition, high inequality measured by income or other characteristics, poor access to infrastructure, growing water stress, the degradation of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, pollution, and climate change. Under business-as-usual trajectories the environmental challenges in particular are expected to worsen significantly. Enhanced international policy coordination and cooperation around shared goals is required to reverse these trends, and many developing countries require more external financial assistance. In response governments have adopted international development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and their successors, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are to be achieved by 2030. These goals complement earlier tools for international policy coordination, notably the environmental conventions, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. This thesis contributes to the need to understand how progress towards the SDGs can be monitored, how investment needs for climate-resilient development and the SDGs can be estimated, and what lessons can be drawn for international financing mechanisms in support of the SDGs from the experience of the health sector under the MDGs. These issues represent important contemporary questions in the scientific and policy literature, as evidenced by the rapidly growing scientific literature on the SDGs to which this thesis contributes. Chapter 2 introduces a novel SDG Index and Dashboards that combines official and science-based metrics to establish an SDG baseline for the 149 countries for which sufficient data are currently available. The SD