Feeding the Future: EAT-Lancet 2025 Sounds the Alarm on Food, Planet and Justice
- Sharon Cittone
- Oct 5
- 5 min read
The world’s food systems are pushing the planet beyond its ecological limits, and leaving billions behind. That’s the urgent message of the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission Report on Healthy, Sustainable, and Just Food Systems, the most comprehensive global scientific assessment ever produced on the state of food and its intertwined relationship with health, climate, and equity.
Building on its landmark 2019 report, this new Commission, a coalition of leading experts in nutrition, economics, climate science, and social justice from over 35 countries, paints an even starker picture. The food we grow, trade, and eat is now the largest contributor to the transgression of planetary boundaries, while deep inequities in wealth and power continue to define who benefits and who bears the costs.
Yet the report also offers hope: shifting diets, transforming production, and ensuring fairer food systems could save up to 15 million lives per year, cut emissions by more than half, and deliver trillions of dollars in returns through improved health, restored ecosystems, and greater resilience.
The Planetary Breakdown
Food systems currently generate between 16 and 17.7 gigatonnes of CO₂-equivalent annually, roughly 30% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. But this is only part of the picture. According to the Commission’s updated modelling, food systems are the largest driver of five out of six breached planetary boundaries: climate, biodiversity, land, freshwater, and nutrient pollution. They also significantly impact three others: aerosol loading, ocean acidification, and ozone depletion.
Even a total global shift away from fossil fuels, the report warns, would not be enough to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target without transforming how we produce and consume food. To stay within safe planetary limits, food-related emissions must fall below 5 gigatonnes of CO₂-equivalent per year by 2050, a more than 60% reduction from current levels.
The 2025 report’s scientific underpinnings are stronger than ever, built on a multimodel ensemble of ten global economic and food system models, the most advanced ever used in this field. This allows for a robust, regionally nuanced picture of how diets, agriculture, and trade interact with planetary boundaries.
“The report sets out the clearest guidance yet for feeding a growing population without breaching the safe operating space on Earth,” said Johan Rockström, Commission Co-Chair and Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “It also exposes the stark winners and losers in today’s food systems, where entrenched power dynamics drive deep inequities. The evidence is undeniable: transforming food systems is not only possible, it’s essential to securing a safe, just, and sustainable future for all.”
From Sustainability to Justice
Perhaps the most transformative element of the 2025 Commission is its explicit integration of justice into the planetary health framework. While the 2019 report focused primarily on health and environment, this new version introduces three dimensions of justice, distributive, representational, and recognitional, anchored in three universal rights: to food, to a healthy environment, and to decent work.
This shift expands the conversation from sustainability to fairness. The report finds that fewer than 1% of people live within the “safe and just space,” where both human needs and planetary boundaries are respected. Around 3.7 billion people remain below social foundations, unable to afford healthy food, earn a living wage, or access safe working conditions, while 6.9 billion people live in countries that overshoot environmental limits.
As Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, Co-Chair and Director for Nutrition, Health and Food Security at CGIAR, emphasized: “Right now, too many people who grow and process our food are underpaid and excluded from basic protections, while the environmental and health costs fall hardest on the most vulnerable. Transformation must guarantee the right to food, fair work, and a healthy environment for all.”
The report quantifies this inequity in stark terms: the wealthiest 30% of people drive more than 70% of food-related environmental impacts, while almost one-third of food system workers earn below a living wage. In short, the world’s food system is as unequal as it is unsustainable.
A New Food Equation
The Commission’s advanced modelling shows that shifting global diets could reduce premature deaths by 27%, the equivalent of 15 million lives annually, while helping to bring the planet back within ecological limits. The revised Planetary Health Diet (PHD) provides the blueprint: a flexible, largely plant-rich diet that prioritizes whole grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, with moderate amounts of animal-source foods and limited added sugars and fats.
The updated PHD also incorporates new evidence linking dietary patterns to reduced risks of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and cognitive decline, while remaining adaptable to regional and cultural food traditions. Across all regions, the analysis finds that diets remain deficient in plant-based foods and overloaded with animal fats, sugar, and ultra-processed products, patterns that harm both health and the planet.
“By increasing the production and consumption of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes, we can improve health outcomes everywhere while respecting cultural and regional traditions,” said Walter Willett, Commission Co-Chair and Professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But diets are just one part of the picture, transformation requires action across the whole system.”
The Economics of Transformation
The report makes a compelling economic case: food systems transformation could deliver $5 trillion per year in returns through improved health, restored ecosystems, and climate resilience, more than ten times the estimated $200–500 billion annual investment required to make it happen.
Moreover, through ecological intensification, techniques such as agroforestry, soil carbon management, and biodiversity restoration, agriculture could shift from being a net emitter to becoming a carbon sink. This transition could not only reduce emissions but actively help reverse climate change, positioning food systems as one of the most powerful levers for planetary recovery.
Transformative Pathways: Eight Core Solutions
To translate evidence into action, the Commission sets out eight priority areas for governments, industry, and civil society:
Protect and promote traditional healthy diets
Create affordable, accessible food environments
Implement sustainable production practices that store carbon and restore ecosystems
Halt agricultural expansion into intact ecosystems
Reduce food loss and waste across the value chain
Secure fair working conditions and living wages
Ensure representation and agency for food system workers
Recognize and protect marginalized groups
These measures form a roadmap for collective action. The Commission stresses that change must be both top-down and bottom-up, combining policy reforms, financial realignment, and grassroots participation. True transformation, it argues, will only occur when justice and planetary stewardship are pursued together.
The Global Crossroads
As the world’s population heads toward 9.6 billion by 2050, the message from the EAT-Lancet Commission is clear: business-as-usual is not an option. Food systems, once a symbol of human ingenuity, are now among the greatest threats to our shared future. But they can also be the solution.
“We are at a global crossroads,” said Willett. “Governments, businesses, civil society, and individuals all have a role to play in realigning food systems for the benefit of all people and the planet.”
With science, policy, and justice now aligned in one framework, the 2025 EAT-Lancet Report reframes the future of food as both a moral and planetary imperative. The choices made today, on farms, in boardrooms, and at dinner tables, will determine whether humanity remains within the safe and just space that sustains life on Earth.
A Moment for Action
As policymakers prepare for COP30 in Belém and the next UN Food Systems Summit stocktake, this report lands like a call to arms. It confirms what climate negotiators and public-health experts have long known but rarely tackled together: there is no Paris success without food system transformation.
For governments, the message is to integrate food squarely into climate plans. For businesses, it’s to align portfolios with the Planetary Health Diet and ensure fair wages across supply chains. And for consumers, it’s a reminder that the most powerful climate tool may already be on their plates.
The science is in. The guardrails are clear. The time to act, for people and for the planet, is now.
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