The food system plays an important role in the adaptation and mitigation of climate change. This is the conclusion of the paper Climate Change Responses Benefit from a Global Food System Approach, published on Nature Food. According to the authors, a system approach is fundamental to understand how food production and consumption relates to climate change. The study proposes a methodology that congregates agricultural production, supply chains, transportation, industrial processing, packaging, consumption, losses and organic waste processing. When these activities are considered as a whole, they account for a considerable share of about 21-37% of total human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This new outlook also allows for more comprehensive assessment of the vulnerability of the global food system to droughts, intensifying heat waves, and heavier rains and coastal floodings. Hence the researchers believe that the food system can also contribute to attenuating climate change. “The food system plays an important role in climate change adaptation and mitigation”, explains the Embrapa Agricultural Informatics Luis Gustavo Barioni, researcher Luis Gustavo Barioni, coauthor of the paper. He participated with the other authors in the Food Security chapter of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Climate Change and Land released in 2019. To respond to climate change, countries should assess not only agricultural production, but also factors interrelated to meeting food demand, such as the efficiencies of transportation systems, industrial processing, use of packagings, waste processing, and others. Thus this kind of analysis moves beyond the traditional approach to encompass strategies related to demand, the researchers point out. “This approach brings into focus the emissions from all relevant food system activities, both within and outside the farm gate”, asserts Francesco N. Tubiello, senior officer of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO). This would eliminate “the artificial separation between agriculture and related land use activities in the member country reports submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)”, Tubiello says. Barioni adds that “the food system assessment eliminates artificial barriers between agriculture, agroindustry and the food trade. Similarly, he points to the need to review the traditional attribution of emissions and impacts of mitigation and adaptation activities according to national borders. Foods can be produced in a country, processed in another, consumed in a third one and generate indirect impacts on a fourth country”, the researcher explains. “The global food system approach represents a significant advance in helping producers and consumers plan effective and well-integrated climate change responses”, says Cynthia Rosenzweig, the main author and head of the NASA GISS Climate Impacts Group and of the Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research. For Cheikh Mbow, another one of the co-authors and director of the University of Pretoria's Future Africa, “address sustainable development and climate challenges, the food system approach helps countries implement a range of context-specific responses on adaptation and mitigation”. “Reducing food loss and waste from across the entire food chain can now be considered as well, which can lead to opportunities for food systems to engage in the circular economy”, states Mario Herrero, chief research scientist of Agriculture and Food at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). This approach reveals several interfaces in food system response alternatives, bringing benefits to means of subsistence and biodiversity, according to Prajal Pradhan, co-author and agroecologist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Such responses also help to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. For example, increasing soil organic matter can help sequester carbon and enhance resilience to drought, as well as boost productivity and soil biodiversity”, he assesses. “Diversification of the food system by establishing integrated production systems and broad-based genetic resources can reduce risks from climate change”, says Murukesan Krishnapillai, scientist of the College of Micronesia-FSM. “This is particularly important for smallholder farmers, who are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change”, adds Erik Mencos Contreras, researcher at Columbia University. The authors of the paper are as follows: Cynthia Rosenzweig, Cheikh Mbow, Luis G. Barioni, Tim G. Benton, Mario Herrero, Murukesan Krishnapillai, Emma Liwenga, Prajal Pradhan, Marta G. Rivera-Ferre, Tek Sapkota, Francesco N. Tubiello, Yinlong Xu, Erik Mencos Contreras and Joana Portugal Pereira. Translation: Mariana Medeiros, based on press release by the authors.