Reviews & Analysis

Reliably predicting where crop yields may stagnate in the future can offer a suite of benefits for food system sustainability.

The protein transition seeks to mitigate the adverse impacts of production and consumption of animal-sourced foods. Three diverse but partially overlapping narratives emerge from the scientific literature, addressing drivers of change, actionable pathways and visions for the future.

In vivo mercury demethylation by rice plants, involving neither light nor microorganisms, has major implications for human health and possibly even global mercury cycling.

We present an interdisciplinary conceptual framework of urban agriculture and synthesize its social–ecological effects across scales. Using those theoretical foundations, we proposed a multiphase developmental pathway for scaling up urban agriculture, including dynamics, processes, accelerators and feedback loops, which elucidated key considerations associated with achieving transformative change in urban regions.

Material flow and ecological network analysis of China’s coupled nitrogen and phosphorus flows shows trade-offs and synergies between food and energy systems.

Redesigning crop management practices for climate, crop and soil co-optimization has great potential to maintain high yields, mitigate social and environmental impacts, and support sustainable agricultural intensification.

The application of an integrated assessment framework in four countries in sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates how anticipatory governance and decision support tools can help inform policy-making at the national level in the face of looming climate and nutrition crises.

Biofortification was first proposed as a low-cost, sustainable technique to enhance the nutritional value of staple food crops. This Perspective argues that both the micronutrients and the types of crop biofortified need to expand under rapid dietary change and proposes strategies to integrate biofortification into the global food system.

In the runup to the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, global progress on nutritional security and environmental sustainability has slowed. A new framework aims to help countries accelerate their ambitions, allowing them to set and monitor targets across food systems.

Increasing nitrogen (N) fertilization does not proportionally increase crop production. The integrative application of knowledge-based N management by synchronizing crop N demand with N supply is effective for enhancing crop N uptake while reducing its losses to the environment.

If people with unhealthy or typical dietary patterns in the UK were to follow the Eatwell Guide recommendations or longevity-associated dietary patterns, they would likely see substantial gains in life expectancy.

A systematic review of micronutrient retention after processing of foods biofortified with provitamin A or minerals (iron and/or zinc) enabled the creation of an online, interactive dashboard that helps users to choose suitable food processing methods for maximal micronutrient retention.

The relevance of history to contemporary food security issues is often overlooked, yet context is key to understand drivers of vulnerability and to design interventions. This Review offers a historical account of eastern African food systems from 1497 to 1840, including maps, documentary sources and archaeological data on foodstuffs, farming and diets.

Agricultural extension services are critical for food security and rural development but face several limitations—particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Based on real-life testing of GPT to generate technical advice for cassava farmers in Nigeria, this Perspective examines the shortcomings of this technology, as well as its potential to transform extension services.

A database reveals global patterns of the abundance and diversity of bacteria beneficial to plants and predicts that these vital bacteria may be threatened by future climate change. Such information is critical to sustainably address and safeguard the globe’s growing agricultural demands.

Simple dietary changes could cut carbon footprints, but the impact on other aspects of environmental sustainability and nutrition must be carefully considered.

Public health policies can have implications beyond their intended outcomes. A causal-loop diagram for sugar-sweetened beverage taxes was developed using a systems-thinking approach, emphasizing the trajectory of different outcomes over time.

With a better understanding of the soil microbiome and its interactions with plants, designing a synthetic bacterial community may complement current agricultural practices to enhance plant performance on marginal soils.

Multiple stable cell lines will be needed for cultivated meat scale-up and industrial production. This Review explores the potential of myogenic, adipogenic and extracellular matrix-producing adult stem cells and embryonic or inducible pluripotent stem cells for their proliferative and differentiation capacity, necessary for cultivated meat production.

Elevated CO₂, global warming, ozone pollution and drought are major climate-related environmental challenges affecting field crop production. This Review discusses strategies and opportunities for crop production under climate change and air pollution at the plant, field and ecosystem scales.