Environmental Change, Food Systems and the Pursuit of Food Security and Healthy, Sustainable Diets

The field of nutritional ecology and anthropology increasingly foregrounds the complex interactions between environmental disruption, food environments, and diet quality as global food systems face unprecedented stress. Climate-related shocks remain central, but they intersect with wider environmental pressures, including water insecurity and declining water quality, biodiversity loss, land use change, pollution, and other novel entities that are reshaping the availability, processing, and consumption of food, with rippling effects on equity, public health, and planetary boundaries. Recent studies demonstrate that these disruptions have direct and indirect repercussions not only for food availability, but also for affordability, diversity, and safety, while influencing household choices, market structures, and policy responses. Ongoing debates address how best to capture shifting nutritional risks and adaptation strategies as communities, markets, and governments respond, and highlight the need for more integrative research across biology, behaviour, and social systems. Despite advances in recognising the multifaceted impacts of environmental change on food systems, gaps remain in understanding the mechanisms that connect environmental disruptions to human nutritional outcomes, the mediation of these impacts by culture and social organisation, and the design of interventions that protect both human and planetary wellbeing.This Research Topic aims to advance theory and evidence on how environmental disruptions reshape food systems and food environments, and how societies adapt to safeguard food security and support healthy and sustainable diets within ecological limits. Key goals include clarifying the pathways by which environmental disruptions affect food availability, affordability, safety, and dietary patterns; elucidating how cultural norms, livelihoods, and institutions mediate these effects; and critically evaluating interventions and policies that promote resilient food systems, dietary health, and environmental sustainability. The Topic also seeks to strengthen conceptual and methodological frameworks that integrate biological, ecological, economic, and sociocultural perspectives, and to foster submissions that provide practical insights for improving food system resilience, equity, and long-term sustainability.The scope of this Research Topic encompasses original research, reviews, conceptual and methodological advances, and integrative studies that inform the understanding and transformation of food systems under environmental pressures from a nutritional ecology and anthropology perspective. Contributions that address theoretical, empirical, and applied questions are encouraged. To gather further insights in these areas, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:o Food systems dynamics and disruptions across production, storage, processing, transport, and retailo Food environments, consumer behaviour, and adaptation in response to environmental disruptions and shockso Nutritional ecology, biological and behavioural adaptation, and vulnerabilities in at-risk groupso Food anthropology and sociocultural resilience, including food sharing, norms, and local ecological knowledgeo Food policy, governance, health economics, and the evaluation of interventions for resilience, dietary health, and sustainabilityo Healthy and sustainable diets, including diet quality, equity, and metrics for environmental impacto Environmental pressures affecting food systems, including climate shocks, water insecurity, biodiversity loss, land use change, pollution, and related ecological stressorso Methods and measurement innovations, such as mixed-methods research and critical perspectives on conventional approaches Topic editors: Sarah Edewor, Dr. Ayan Chatterjee (PhD), Agatha Ogbe Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79168/environmental-change-food-systems-and-the-pursuit-of-food-security-and-healthy-sustainable-diets