Adding to this the 1.3 billion tons of food wasted every year ( El-Hage Scialabba, 2019) - roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption - it appears likely that food security and sustainability cannot be a matter of sole improvements in production yields and food processing technologies.Īs hotspots of the world population and the place of consumption for most (79%) of the food produced worldwide ( FAO. In addition, with nearly 11% of the world population suffering from chronic undernourishment and about two billion adults overweight or obese in 2016 ( Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN), 2016), unbalances in dietary patterns are evident. Throughout the 20th century, food demand has been largely met through increases in the yields of staple crops (i.e., wheat, maize, rice and soybean) ( Runyan and Stehm, 2019), but the continuation of similar gains in yield is unlikely due to natural resources scarcity and increasingly frequent and intense climate-related events ( Toreti et al., 2019). Food has particularly gained a central role in our societal run-up towards a sustainable future as confirmed by the recent EAT-Lancet report ( Willett et al., 2019) and some of the SDGs (i.e., SDG targets 2.4 and 12.3) set out in the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ( UN, 2015). Fundamental changes in the way societies produce and consume resources are seen as indispensable for achieving global sustainable development. Humans have played, and continue to play, a key role in altering the biophysical dynamics of the planet, and the need is growing for unsustainable economic and social trends to be inverted ( Barnosky et al., 2016 Davis et al., 2016 Steffen et al., 2018). Similarities with other countries within Europe and their implications are also discussed. Results show that food consumption in Portugal is the single largest reason (≈30%) for transgressing the carrying capacity of Earth ecosystems but, despite the urgent need for changes in Portuguese food systems, major deficiencies in local policy implementation exist with weak policy commitment, coordination, and lacking institutional capacity as food policies – especially at the local level – are still not prioritized. A critical assessment of gaps in national and local food policies to trigger a major transformation in the Portuguese food system is also conducted on the basis of a newly proposed analytical framework. Here we investigate the significance of food in comparison to other daily anthropogenic demands and the current sourcing and resource intensities profiles of dietary patterns at Portuguese national and city level through Ecological Footprint Accounting.

In Portugal, a country characterized by high meat and fish consumption, noticeable food wastage, and high urbanization level, fully understanding and then transforming the food system is of priority. The food system is increasingly acknowledged as the single largest reason for humans' transgression of key planetary limits and it is gaining centrality in our societal run-up towards a sustainable future, especially at city level.

Ruaf roadblock