Linking food and land system research in Europe

Markus A. Meyer, Andrea Früh-Müller, Isabella Lehmann and Nina Schwarz

Land Use Policy, 2023, vol. 131, issue C

Abstract: Food-system studies often assess dynamics in production, consumption or processing and logistics in a spatially abstract manner. Land-system studies traditionally analyze land-use/land cover change with its environmental and societal drivers as well as impacts and are typically spatially explicit. Primary production is a main node where food and land systems overlap. We used a systematic literature review to determine how existing studies in Europe address the interface of food and land systems. We identified three pathways of studies: economic, footprint and crop modeling studies (pathway 1), and scenario-based land-use/land-cover change and remote sensing studies (pathway 2), and (qualitative) policy studies (pathway 3). The reviewed studies only partially integrate land- and food-system research. Most of these studies are stronger on the land- than on the food-system side and miss processing as well as distribution and sales. In addition, major linkages between land and food systems are implemented deterministically in the reviewed studies (e.g., through static land requirements for diets). Here, the role of actors and dynamic models considering systemic feedbacks could improve the realisms of studies. Therefore, this study develops a framework to reveal the interplay between food- and land-system research. It focusses on urban-rural linkages as both research strands analyze major processes at this interface: the rural-urban exchange of food and urban sprawl. Future research should especially address and quantify governance, which is hardly quantified to date. Urban-rural linkages are weakly considered in the reviewed literature and if considered only from an urban perspective. Thereby, it would be interesting to study to which extent rural population and governance shape urban-rural-linkages, and how a change of focus from rural to urban areas could provide additional insights.

Keywords: Food systems; Land system; Value chain; Urban; Rural; PRISMA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837723001588
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:131:y:2023:i:c:s0264837723001588

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2023.106692

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().