Multicritera assessment of food system sustainability. A Special Feature in Ecology & Society

By 2050 human populations will reach 9 billion and 70% more food will be required. Increased agricultural production is already threatened by shortage of water, severe land degradation in existing agricultural landscapes, land-use intensification, invasive species, prospects of energy price hikes, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services and climate change. This alignment of current and rapidly emerging problems represents a truly major set of coupled environmental, economic and social challenges for humanity . In order to develop better and more sustainable food systems, we need to make overall assessments of their effects based on multiple and varied criteria. Furthermore, if such overall multicriteria assessments are actually going to be used to generate sustainable solutions, we also need to be able to effectively communicate the multidimensional assessments and how they are founded in knowledges and values in order to engender collaboration between stakeholders and actors at local, regional, national and global scales. The focus of the proposed special issue is on these complex challenges of making and communicating overall assessments of food systems sustainability. The objective is to apply multiple perspectives to address two of the main challenges: 1) how to balance and integrate very different types of assessments of sustainability options and consequences with different kinds of knowledge bases, and 2) how to more effectively communicate complex overall assessments in such a way they are trusted and can be used in practice by different actors and stakeholders with very different perspectives, values and sites of action