Different places, different challenges: mapping global variations in agrifood-system burdens

The global agrifood system is central to many challenges humanity faces today. Despite significant growth in total production, it fails to ensure food security for all, drives biodiversity decline, and majorly contributes to climate change. Research on agrifood-system burdens often focusses on the national level and isolated burdens, ignoring their systemic complexity. We address this knowledge gap by combining global subnational datasets proxying four key dimensions of agrifood-system burdens: environmental footprint, climate change, income poverty, and malnutrition. We map global hotspots of co-occurring agrifood-system burdens for 2017. We overlay these with data on ambient population counts, agricultural areas, farm size distributions, and lands inhabited by Indigenous peoples to identify spatial correspondence between people in vulnerable contexts and food production regions facing these burdens. We further assess countries’ relative burden against their inequality and governance indicators. Burden hotspots occupy many regions worldwide, especially in low-income, (sub)tropical regions. Single burdens occupy regions harbouring about 5 billion people (∼66% of the global population) and 1.8 billion ha of agricultural lands (∼40%), while multiple burdens occupy regions with about 1.9 billion people and 470 million ha agricultural lands. Environmental footprint is the strongest contributor to these burden profiles. Regions with traditionally marginalised communities (i.e. small-scale farmers and Indigenous peoples) disproportionally face multiple burdens. Agrifood-system burdens are more prevalent in countries with higher economic inequality and poorer governance. Burden profiles vary substantially within and between countries, necessitating regionalised and context-specific policies for effective, bundled, and targeted solutions. Addressing agrifood-system burdens can also synergise with tackling other current global challenges, like biodiversity loss and environmental justice.