Navigating the sustainability challenges of food systems: A review of life cycle-based environmental footprints and future directions

Ensuring food security while mitigating environmental degradation remains a critical challenge for global sustainability. Food systems, encompassing production, transportation, consumption, and waste, exert significant environmental pressures, such as greenhouse gas emissions, excessive water and land use, and nutrient losses. This study systematically reviews the environmental footprints of food systems from a life cycle perspective, analyzing research trends, and hot issues. The results reveal a sharp increase in publications on carbon and water footprints, while nitrogen, phosphorus, biodiversity, and chemical footprints remain comparatively underexplored. Keyword co-occurrence analysis further illustrates this imbalance by identifying six key research hotspots, with “carbon footprint” and “water footprint” most frequently studied. The findings underscore the strong interconnection between agriculture, dietary choices, and environmental impacts, emphasizing the pivotal role of sustainable diets and green agricultural practices in advancing food system sustainability. Future research should prioritize expanding the footprint diversity and increasing the representation of studies in less developed regions to support a more comprehensive understanding of sustainability challenges. The safe operating space of the food system also needs to be redefined to better align with achieving food security within planetary boundaries. In addition, future research should establish a food-environment-society-economic nexus framework to integrate food systems with the SDGs and capture the complex interlinkages and trade-offs between different systems. This review provides new insights into future research and policy directions for sustainable food system transformation.