Environmental impacts
The global food system inextricably connects human health and environmental integrity. It holds the transforma-
tive capability to significantly reduce levels of environmental degradation, caused by current food production
practices, and alleviate the ‘triple burden’ of malnutrition, existing due to food consumption patterns. System-
wide transitions are therefore paramount to tackling environmental and nutritional challenges that are exacer-
bated by a rapidly growing population. This work presents a novel application of Data Envelopment Analysis
(DEA) to study the sustainability of food supply patterns around the world and appraise the potential to lower
environmental pressure without compromising the supply of calories and nutritional quality. By relating envi-
ronmental impacts to caloric availability and nutritional adequacy, DEA computes a relative performance score
for 139 countries and identifies only 18 countries with per capita food supplies that are ‘efficient’ in transforming
five environmental inputs (land use, greenhouse gas emissions, acidification potential, eutrophication potential
and freshwater withdrawals) into calories and nutrition. The widespread extent of ‘inefficiency’ stresses that
the significant opportunity and need to reduce environmental impacts from food is truly global and extensive.
Results of this analysis also provide quantitative information on the varying degrees of potential to improve
the ways in which each nation's population is fed and therefore offers country-specific insight for decision-
makers into the integration of environmental and nutritional outcomes for sustainable development.