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The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
The findings of the latest EAT–Lancet Report were stark, but unsurprising. Despite producing enough food globally, more than half the world’s population cannot access healthy, affordable diets. Meanwhile, obesity and diet-related diseases continue to rise, and our food system continues to drive roughly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, undermining the ecological foundations we depend on.
Tackling the critical question of how we can feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050 without breaching planetary limits, the report’s central message is clear: diets globally must change, but what that shift looks like will vary by country, culture and current eating patterns.
At the core of the Commission’s vision remains the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, predominantly plant-based diet with limited amounts of meat and minimal sugar and salt. If adopted globally, the report argues this could prevent up to 15 million deaths each year while keeping humanity within the planet’s ecological “safe zone”.
The PHD outlines universal principles: diets rich in whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts, with modest amounts of fish, dairy, and poultry, and minimal red meat, sugar, and ultra-processed foods. Yet its key strength lies in its flexibility. The Commission emphasises that these ranges must accommodate the wide variety of foods, agricultural systems, cultural traditions and individual dietary preferences that exist globally. This is not about imposing a single "right way" to eat, but rather about understanding the parameters within which diverse food cultures can thrive while still respecting planetary limits.
Achieving this transformational shift requires making the PHD aspirational, appealing, and delicious. This demands investment in next-generation culinary development, food environment interventions, and narrative change efforts that make healthier choices the easier choices - work that organisations across sectors are already advancing.
A sobering reality in the report is that even if everyone adopted the planetary health diet, we would barely stay within planetary boundaries. Understanding why requires grasping what these boundaries are and how food systems breach them.
Planetary boundaries represent the scientific limits that keep Earth's systems stable enough to support human life. Crossing these boundaries pushes the planet into unsafe territory where abrupt, irreversible changes become more likely. Six of the nine boundaries have already been exceeded, with food systems driving much of the pressure, especially on land use, biodiversity, climate, water, and nutrient pollution.
The report is clear that what we eat, where and how that food is produced, processed, and distributed shapes the length and quality of people's lives as well as our ability to remain within planetary boundaries. Yet current policies often reinforce these pressures. In the EU, for example, more than 80% of agricultural subsidies still support animal-based production. Ensuring that dietary change does not intensify planetary pressures requires affluent nations to lead in reducing overconsumption and shifting to healthier, lower-impact diets. Without major changes in both consumption and production, especially in wealthier regions, global dietary transitions risk simply shifting environmental harm onto the most vulnerable rather than reducing it.
A central development in the EAT-Lancet 2.0 report, compared to the 2019 version, is its emphasis on justice as fundamental to transforming food systems. The report highlights the stark reality that today, only 1% of the world’s population lives within a “safe and just space”. This concept of a safe and just space describes the zone where humanity remains below environmental thresholds that maintain planetary stability and above the social foundations necessary for justice.
These social foundations encompass the minimum conditions required for everyone’s rights to be met, including access to healthy and affordable diets, safe food environments, a non-toxic and stable climate, living wages, and meaningful representation in decision-making. Yet nearly half of the world’s population lives below these social foundations, while, at the same, food systems in 144 countries exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Justice is therefore not simply a desirable goal, but prerequisite for action necessary to overcome entrenched structural barriers that currently impede transformative change. Without fair access to these social foundations, people cannot participate in or support the changes needed. A fair food system must therefore deliver three interconnected dimensions of justice: distributive justice (a fair distribution of resources and burdens), representational justice (ensuring equitable decision-making power and political voice) and recognitional justice (affirming diverse identities, experiences, and needs).
By grounding their approach in human rights, the report makes it clear that transforming food systems requires not only ecological action but a deep commitment to fairness that enables all people, and all nations, to enter the safe and just space.
Europe has a key role to play in global food systems transformation. High levels of consumption, heavy dependence on animal-sourced foods, and entrenched subsidy structures mean that European diets European diets exert a disproportionate pressure on the planet. Shifting towards the PHD therefore requires us to not only to change what they eat but to transform the systems that shape those choices. Central to this will be redirecting food subsidies away from meat production and towards fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and sustainable aquatic foods, as well as reforming food environments and addressing the concentration of corporate power within agribusiness.
A meaningful transition also depends on diversification of both production systems and diets. Moving towards ecological and sustainable practices, tailored to local contexts, is essential for restoring ecosystems while maintaining productivity. Yet this shift challenges the dominant high-yield, standardised, and export-oriented agribusiness model that currently focus on economic productivity and profit.
Transformation will require re-localising supply chains, empowering farmers, strengthening public advisory services, and fostering culinary innovation and cultural change so that healthier, sustainable options become both desirable and accessible. Achieving this also means securing equitable access to land and water, addressing structural imbalances between producers and powerful agribusinesses, and mobilising large-scale public and private investment to support farmers in adapting to new practices.
However, affordability remains a major issue. Under most scenarios in the report, the PHD results in higher food prices, especially when accounting for potential increased emissions mitigation measures. Ensuring equal access will require stronger social protection within wealthy countries, as well as redistributive policies that channel resources toward foods and farming systems that support planetary and human health. The Commission stresses that income redistribution, reductions in food loss and waste, and increased Official Development Assistance, including meeting climate finance commitments and targeted debt relief, will all be crucial to ensuring this transformation can be more equitable and affordable worldwide.
Despite clear evidence on what must change, implementation pathways remain unclear. The scale of transformation is undeniable enormous, and even ambitious scenarios struggle to return the world fully to a safe operating space. The Commission highlights the need for context-specific national roadmaps, better alignment of agricultural and environmental policies, and robust monitoring and accountability systems. Yet balancing the urgency of action with the need for improved data and evaluation remains a key challenge.
Change is already underway, across Europe and globally, with communities, policymakers, and civil society reimagining our food systems. But progress remains far too slow. Feeding 10 billion people within planetary limits demands a rapid acceleration, one that centres justice, shifts in dietary pattern and transforms the policies and economic structures that shape our food environments.
At Healthy Food Healthy Planet, we are working to build the social and political foundations for this transition. Developing narratives rooted in fairness and possibility, fostering coalitions capable of collective leadership and championing community-centred approaches that reflect local cultures and embed justice throughout. We are doubling down on food environments, reshaping what is available, accessible, and desirable, while also strengthening work at the subnational level, where cities and local governments are emerging as crucial implementers of change. Urban settings offer some of the most concrete examples of political commitment, innovation, and real-world pathways to healthier and more sustainable diets.
We are also deepening our focus on finance and economic transitions. As Europe confronts rising climate risks, the question of who bears the cost becomes inescapable. Our work creates space for reflection and strategy around stranded assets, insurance mechanisms, and the financial tools needed to protect farmers while steering investment toward sustainable food systems. This includes building support for an overhaul of Europe’s subsidy architecture to expand production capacity for foods that promote health and ecological resilience.
Transforming food systems is one of the most urgent and consequential tasks of our time. By advancing justice, enabling healthier diets, and reshaping the policy landscape, we can help ensure that the transition not only happens, but happens in a fair just way, for the benefit of all.
A Pan-European movement uniting civil society organisations and funders so that healthy, just and sustainable food environments become the norm and harmful agriculture ends.
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