Results

By The SWITCH Team

As a Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action, generating new knowledge is at the core of the SWITCH project. SWITCH researchers across multiple disciplines have steadily been producing publications in major academic journals and conferences to share knowledge emerging from the project and its activities. Here we present a round-up of five recent publications covering agriculture and environment to economy and community action. 

Feeding climate and biodiversity goals with novel plant-based meat and milk alternatives

A study in Nature Communications run by SWITCH researcher Marta Kozicka and her team at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria, in collaboration with other researchers, modelled what would happen if half the world's consumption of beef, pork, chicken, and milk were replaced with nutritionally equivalent plant-based alternatives by 2050. The results are striking: agriculture and land-use greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 31%, deforestation would be almost entirely halted, and water use would drop by 10%. If the freed-up farmland were actively restored to forest, climate benefits could double, reaching 92% of the land sector's mitigation potential consistent with 1.5°C warming. The authors stress, however, that a just transition will require deliberate policy support for affected farming communities. This paper was also reworked for Frontiers for Young Minds, an open access scientific journal that brings the latest research to school kids.

Read the full paper here

Harvesting change: unraveling social-ecological impacts of a food hub (LebensMittelPunkt) through a living lab approach

A four-year study in Ecology and Society followed the SWITCH community food hub in Berlin at Das Baumhaus to assess its potential to transform the local agri-food system. Researchers tracked food flows across three activities: weekly deliveries from community-supported agriculture farms, community dinners, and food rescuing. Over a single year, the hub distributed over 10 tonnes of food from more than 150 regional products, with CSA deliveries alone potentially meeting over half of members' vegetable needs. The study concludes that food hubs can meaningfully challenge the globalised food system, but realising their full potential requires deeper community engagement and supportive policy frameworks.

Read the full paper here

An in-depth approach on ecological and social processes improve quantifying the climatic impact of food production

A commentary in PLOS Climate by SWITCH researchers at Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) argues that current methods for measuring the climate impact of food production are too simplistic. More accurate assessments require three things: accounting for the emissions of the natural ecosystems that existed before agricultural land use, measuring impacts according to specific site conditions and farming subsectors, and incorporating socio-economic and cultural contexts. The authors show, for instance, that in some pastoral landscapes, natural baseline emissions are comparable to those from livestock farming, meaning removing grazing may not reduce emissions as expected. Better-contextualised assessments, they argue, are essential for designing food policies that are both effective and equitable.

Read the full paper here

Short food supply chains, an alternative economy for sustainable food systems: a mixed approach over time

SWITCH researchers at INRAE in France present a study in Agricultural and Food Economics that draws on over a decade of mixed-methods research to examine how short food supply chains (SFSCs) - direct or near-direct sales between farmers and consumers - operate as an alternative economy. The research finds that while SFSCs generally improve farm income and provide reliable cash flow, their sustainability contribution depends heavily on the informal rules and social relationships that govern each chain. Collective farmer shops and co-created markets, which limit competition and tolerate product variability, are more likely to encourage environmentally-friendly farming than direct supermarket supply, which tends to reproduce industrial quality standards.

Read the full paper here

Pressure on Global Forests: Implications of Rising Vegetable Oils Consumption Under the EAT-Lancet Diet

A study in Global Change Biology by researchers from the SWITCH Project and FoodCLIC project warns that the EAT-Lancet diet's recommended 67% increase in unsaturated oil consumption could significantly worsen deforestation. Modelling future demand for the world's four main food oils (palm, soybean, sunflower, and rapeseed), the researchers find that meeting 2050 requirements under the EAT-Lancet scenario would require 317 million hectares of land, potentially causing 115–120 million hectares of deforestation and nearly doubling land-use greenhouse gas emissions compared to current trends. Crucially, replacing palm oil with other oils would make things worse, not better, given palm oil's far higher yield per hectare. The authors argue sustainable certification across all vegetable oils is the more viable path forward.

Read the full paper here