Hidden impacts of telecoupled food production and consumption

Global food trade is necessary to balance supply and demand across the world due to regional differences including climate, diet preference, and population growth. In the past decades, global food trade has increased exponentially in trading quantity and commodity types, resulting in drastic impacts on food production and global environment. The integrated telecoupling framework offers novel perspectives for researchers to study food production and consumption changes and the related environmental issues. It connects coupled human and natural systems over distances by flows, which provides a systematic analytic lens to understand ecological dynamics and socioeconomic changes by uncovering mechanisms that may be masked by other approaches.

The goal of this session is to demonstrate applications of the telecoupling framework to study the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of food production and consumption, such as distant food production impacts on local environment, and land and water footprints in trading countries driven by distant consumption demand. The presentations in this session reveal complex mechanisms for understanding local food production and consumption, and provide useful information and analytical perspectives for sustainable food production.