There was no escaping the major story this week, as the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission released its ‘Report on Healthy, Sustainable, and Just Food Systems’.
Building on its influential 2019 report, the 2025 edition was billed as the most comprehensive global scientific evaluation of food systems to date. We will undoubtedly be unpicking the full 76-page report in due course, but the five key findings are:
- Shifting global diets could prevent up to 15 million premature deaths per year.
- Food systems are the largest contributor to the transgression of five planetary boundaries.
- Food systems currently account for roughly 30% of total greenhouse gas emissions globally. Transforming food systems could cut these emissions by more than half.
- Fewer than 1% of the world’s population is currently in the ‘safe and just space’, where people’s rights and food needs are met within planetary boundaries.
- The wealthiest 30% of people drive more than 70% of food-related environmental impacts.
Readers of Footprint understand all this. Still, print them and stick them on the wall (in the boardroom if you’re a CSO). You might want to insert this kicker at the bottom:
- The analysis warns that even with a complete global transition away from fossil fuels, food systems could still push temperatures beyond 1.5°C.
And this one (perhaps in red type) could certainly be added at the top:
- Reshaping systems could deliver returns of $5trn a year through better health, restored ecosystems, and climate resilience – more than ten times the $200-500bn investment needed to drive food systems change.
The report is certainly timely as food corporations start to waver on their climate (and wider environment, social and governance) commitments. They are mostly blaming the cost of living crisis and geopolitics, while pointing at inaction, from farm to fork, across the wider food chain (Monday’s premium unpicks this week’s news that Nestlé, the world’s largest food and drink company, has dropped out of a major commitment relating to methane).
With this new report, however, come robust global guardrails for food systems, and a reference point that policymakers, businesses, and citizens can act on together, explained Johan Rockström, Commission co-chair and director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in Germany.
The report is based on analyses by 13 independent modelling groups who assessed how transforming food systems could reduce pressure on key planetary boundaries while improving human health.
The experts discovered that today’s diets generally lack fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, and whole grains, while containing excessive amounts of meat, dairy, fats, sugar, and highly processed foods. Shifting this requires “bundled policy measures” – subsidies for fresh fruit and vegetables, taxes on unhealthy foods – together with stronger social protections to ensure a just transition.
Government policies, as Footprint has long reported, are also lacking in bite, with net-zero emerging as a key battleground for politicians to the left and right. (New Internationalist reported recently how far right leaders and their allies in Silicon Valley exploit today’s crises, including those relating to climate and nature, “not to fix the future but to tighten their grip on a world they believe is already falling apart”. And it is in this “crucible of disaster that monsters emerge”).
Some will undoubtedly find the EAT-Lancet findings ugly. Industry reactions certainly came in thick and fast. The meat industry is none too happy with it all. Others are delighted how it placed the focus on fairness. Futurists said the real work is cultural, not political. There is as ever nuance to all this that will appear as the analysis, findings and recommendations are digested in full.
For now, it is worth considering the point made by Jack A Bobo, executive director of the Rothman Family Institute for Studies, in the US, and former director of the Food Systems Institute at the University of Nottingham, who said:
“The launch of the EAT-Lancet 2.0 is not just about science. It’s about the story we tell. And the story we tell determines the future we get. For too long food system change has been framed as sacrifice – less choice, less prosperity, less future. That narrative doesn’t inspire action, it fuels apathy.
“We need a new story. If we tell a story of better food, better livelihoods, and better futures, then transformation becomes not just possible, but irresistible,” he added.
Looking at new figures from Defra on England’s harvest this year should focus minds. This is one of the three other stories we have this week, which also include the UK Government blocking a report on deforestation and troubling times for lovers of matcha tea.
