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[Viewpoint] Between code and conscience: early-career researcher reflections on agroeconomic modelling and international research collaboration

Work on the second EAT-Lancet Commission report on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems began in 2022 and is now nearing completion after 3 years and contributions from more than 100 researchers. The economic modelling undertaken for the Commission was led by the Global Economics Team of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP)—a collaboration that brings together ten global economic models and modelling teams across different institutions. This Viewpoint, authored by ten early-career researchers (ECRs) from AgMIP who worked on the global economic modelling for the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission, offers the first direct perspectives of ECRs in a large, international collaboration focused on the future of food systems and global economic modelling.

[Review] A review of the quality of evidence of nutrient reference values

Nutrient reference values (NRVs) serve as key benchmarks for assessing nutrient adequacy and informing dietary guidelines. However, their accuracy depends on the quality of the underlying evidence. In this Review, we evaluate the evidence base used by the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to establish NRVs for 21 micronutrients across all life stages. We assessed methodological approaches, sample sizes, publication timelines, and study durations and developed a classification of the quality of evidence based on these factors.

[Articles] Bundling measures for food systems transformation: a global, multimodel assessment

This study highlights the importance of implementing coordinated approaches to food system transformation and climate change mitigation rather than relying on isolated interventions. Comprehensive transformation requires understanding how supply-side and demand-side changes can interact with climate mitigation policies, enabling policy makers to design intervention packages that maximise benefits while minimising trade-offs across environmental, economic, and social dimensions.

[Articles] Integrating circularity into the 2025 EAT–Lancet framework: a global modelling analysis

Circularity enhances and extends the benefits of an EAT–Lancet style food systems transformation via recycling waste for feed and fertiliser use, and complements but does not replace the need for dietary changes. An integration of solutions is needed to transition food systems to the safe operating space within planetary boundaries.

[Articles] Exploring environmental and distributional impacts of different transition pathways for healthier and sustainable diets: an economic modelling study

The interventions chosen to change diets matter for the shift that can be attained and for the direction and size of the environmental, affordability, and distributional impacts. Price incentives can be a more effective, scalable, and just way to shift diets than the often preferred shift in consumer decisions, which make the EL diet more costly. Part of the trade-offs could be addressed by expanding the policy bundle with interventions to lower prices of encouraged foods (productivity increase, food loss and waste reduction) or reduce GHG emissions of food and non-food production, and with regulation of agricultural land expansion to reduce pressure on biodiversity.

[Articles] Affordability and nutritional challenges for the future of EAT diets: an economic modelling analysis

Although dietary shifts towards the 2025 EAT–Lancet Commission diet could offset some of the increases in prices seen in a business-as-usual world, we observed unintended effects on nutrient availability ratios, especially in lower-income countries. The decreasing price index for the cheapest two commodities reflects market adjustments to changes in demand and supply under scenario assumptions aligned with 2025 EAT–Lancet Commission goals for jointly improved human and environmental health. The observed nutrient deficiencies suggest the 2025 EAT–Lancet Commission diet limits on animal-sourced foods might be too strict for lower-income countries, which could exacerbate nutrient deficiencies in contexts where access to animal sourced foods is already low (eg, vitamin A), especially if there is no access to supplementation for meeting these nutritional requirements or other sources of dietary nutrients.

[Articles] Planetary boundaries under a land-based climate change mitigation scenario with a food demand transformation: a modelling study

This research highlights the importance of considering multiple planetary boundaries and the interactions between various mitigation strategies when assessing climate mitigation action in the land system to avoid negative consequences for other aspects of the environment. Following an ambitious climate change mitigation pathway compatible with the Paris Agreement results in a transgression of all assessed five planetary boundaries by 2100. However, the combination of the land-system mitigation measures included in this study produced a substantial shift towards the safe operating space for humanity.

[Articles] Integrating food loss and waste reduction policies with global dietary shifts: an economic modelling study

Policies promoting healthier diets must consider spillover effects on food loss and waste (eg, a potential rise in loss and waste generation when global consumption shifts towards plant-based products). As shifts in production, consumption, and trade alter the magnitude, location, and composition of food loss and waste, monitoring these changes is crucial to establishing the priority areas for food loss and waste reduction or reuse interventions, especially in low-income regions. Although dietary shifts can improve nutrition, new technologies and market-based approaches to reuse discarded food and food waste—whether linked to domestic consumption or trade—could create economic opportunities and environmental benefits.

[Newsdesk] Planetary Health Research Digest

The impacts of elevated temperatures on human health are well established—with increased rates of cardiovascular, respiratory, infectious, and other physical ailments associated with elevated heat exposure. Given that impaired cognitive function and mental ill health are also associated with excess heat, Konstantina Vasilakopoulou (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, VIC, Australia) and Matthaios Santamouris posit that prolonged exposure to elevated heat might impact learning in urban educational settings.

[Feature] Toxic trade: shipbreaking in South Asia

The sight is dramatic. A small crew navigates an old, rusty ship a few miles offshore and then steers it full speed ahead into a sandy beach. When the tide is low, unskilled, informal workers come out with sledgehammers and other hand tools to tear the vessel apart. Young men wearing minimal protective gear cut wires and pipes and use blowtorches to blast through ship hulls. The process is the beaching and breaking down of ships at the end of their life. Most old ships are recycled this way, and it happens on just three beaches—Gadani in Pakistan, Alang in India, and Chittagong in Bangladesh.

[Comment] A centre of gravity: Asia–Pacific leadership in global food systems transformation

More than half the world’s population resides in the Asia–Pacific region, and it plays a central role in global food production and trade across both land-based and aquatic systems. Food systems in the region are undergoing rapid and uneven transitions, shaped by corporate concentration, trade liberalisation, rising incomes, urbanisation, and population ageing.1,2 These factors have reshaped supply chains, expanding processing, logistics, and retail. Although these changes have improved efficiency and broadened supply, they have led to concentration of market power, pressured smallholders, and driven land-use change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and health risks.

[Editorial] An EAT special

Our current food system is a major source of environmental degradation and, despite producing enough annually to feed the entire world population, it leaves more than 8% of people undernourished, while in wealthier countries overnutrition and poor-quality diets are leading contributors to the burden of disease. The 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission recognised the importance of food as a leaver to improve human health while tackling global environmental threats. Since that first publication of a flexitarian Planetary Health Diet (PHD), recommending less animal sourced, highly processed, and sugary foods, and more fruits, vegetables, pulses, and wholegrains, key questions have arisen about its nutritional adequacy, affordability, and how an effective and just food transition might come about.

[Personal View] Rift Valley fever epidemiology: shifting the paradigm and rethinking research priorities

Rift Valley fever (RVF), a zoonotic mosquito-borne viral disease with erratic occurrence and complex epidemiology, results in substantial costs to veterinary and public health and national economies. Since 1985, RVF virus (RVFV) epidemiology has focused on epidemics triggered by flood-induced emergence of transovarially infected mosquitoes, following an interepidemic period during which RVFV persists primarily in floodwater Aedes spp mosquito eggs, with potential for low-level interepidemic circulation.

[Personal View] Priority climate and health modelling needs

Climate and health modelling is necessary for improving understanding of the current and future distribution and timing of climate-related health risks. However, underinvestment in this area has limited the understanding required to inform policies that enable multisectoral interventions to safeguard health. We synthesised insights from a survey of 65 global climate and health modelling experts and 36 participants in a hybrid meeting to identify priority strategies for enhancing the validity, utility, and policy relevance of climate and health models.

[Personal View] Reducing the threats of rodent-borne zoonoses requires an understanding and leveraging of three key pillars: disease ecology, synanthropy, and rodentation

Rodents have co-existed with humans for centuries, and frequently exchange pathogens. Historically, rodent-driven plague outbreaks scoured the Old World, resulting in substantial human mortality. Although such pandemics have not occurred for centuries, serious threats from rodent-borne infections, such as the global emergence of mpox, still exist. Moreover, endemic and emerging rodent infections continue to cause substantial human morbidity and mortality in low-income and middle-income countries.