Advances and future needs for modelling sustainable and just food systems transformations

Food systems underpin human health, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability; yet, they remain major contributors to climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequity. Building on the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems, a special collection of papers in The Lancet Planetary Health highlights emerging frontiers for research and modelling. Across models, dietary change remains the most effective lever for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and land-use pressure from food production, although affordability and nutritional adequacy challenges persist, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries. Productivity improvements, reductions in food loss and waste, and the adoption of circular food systems can amplify environmental gains while mitigating cost increases, but their implementation requires safeguards to prevent adverse trade-offs. Labour and equity analyses highlight how transitions might redistribute employment and income, underscoring the need for just transition strategies. Collectively, the studies reveal that bundled interventions combining dietary shifts, productivity growth, food loss and waste reduction, and mitigation policies produce the largest synergistic benefits across environmental and health outcomes. Future modelling must deepen integration of justice, political economy, and behavioural change dynamics and enhance regional specificity to inform feasible and equitable transformation pathways at policy-relevant scales. Together with more robust stakeholder processes, these priorities define a forward-looking agenda for food systems research capable of guiding sustainable, inclusive, and resilient transformations within planetary boundaries.