Food systems interact with, and affect, the environment in a great many ways beyond their greenhouse gas emissions.  In order to feed humans, the global food system occupies over a third of the earth’s land surface; extracts large amounts of fish and animals from natural habitats; makes huge claims on natural resources; and dispurses various pollutants into the environment. An appreciation of this wide range of environmental impacts is needed to understand why food systems are central to solving many of our biggest environmental problems, and ultimately to maintaining human well-being. Also useful, is to understand that the causes and solutions to these problems are often interconnected through food systems, resulting in trade-off situations where a course of action can at the same time, make one issue better and another worse.

How food gets to our plates and what happens afterwards, connects many issues of concern, including health, biodiversity, climate change, livelihoods, and more. This chapter, and associated resources, provides an entry point into ‘food systems’ thinking and the multifaceted set of issues that are connected through food. It provides a foundation for the wider set of ideas and complexities that are explored in the other chapters of Foodsource.

Food systems are central to human well-being. We rely on them for nourishment, employment, livelihoods, culture and more. Reliable access to sufficient food is a foundation of human health, and of social and political stability. While the impacts of food systems on the environment are great, changes to the climate and the wider environment — to which food systems contribute — also have major implications for the functioning of food systems and all that they support. Understanding this matters, because sustainable food systems in the future must not only maintain human well-being with fewer environmental impacts, but must also be able to cope to different environmental conditions to those experienced today.