Sustainable Food Systems for Improved Nutrition Outcomes

Today’s food systems are broken, undermining nutrition, and greatly contributing to climate change. Understanding the links between food systems, climate change, and malnutrition is vital for devising effective strategies to mitigate these interconnected challenges and to deliver nutritious, safe, affordable, and sustainable diets. Siloed thinking remains amongst the food systems, nutrition, and climate communities. There is a lack of a common understanding of food systems in the nutrition community and a need to raise awareness on nutrition as an outcome of sustainable food systems. Gaps in evidence include a need for country-specific examples of effective strategies at country and community levels to influence wider policymaking, gaps in evidence around nutrition impacts of changing food environments for the urban poor, the role of gender in climate change and women and adolescent girl’s nutrition, the role of sustainable food systems in the prevention and treatment of wasting and stunting and how individual factors including barriers to decision-making and agency, in particular for women, impact nutrition.

ENN will generate, curate, and share knowledge to positively influence policy and programming for sustainable food systems contributing to nutrition security. Our focus will be on examining and filling knowledge gaps around sustainable food systems within fragile and conflict-affected environments and how food systems can be better orientated for the prevention of malnutrition, including through a dietary approach.