Global capacity of dietary sustainability to deal with climate change

The blueprint for feeding the world’s population within the planetary boundaries is to build “capacity of dietary sustainability”—everyone can access and afford a healthy and environmentally friendly diet with relatively greater stability under global shocks such as climate change. But the global capacity of dietary sustainability to deal with climate change remains unknown. Here we developed a novel framework to evaluate dietary sustainability and assess capacity of dietary sustainability to deal with climate change in nutritional security (Capacity nut ), social equity (Capacity soc ), and environmental protection (Capacity env ) dimensions, based on publicly available dietary sustainability data and climate change data from websites. Descriptive statistics results showed that the average score for the three capacities in rural areas was 7.32% higher than in urban areas, and that the Gini coefficient for the three capacities in urban areas was 28% higher than in rural areas. Urban areas showed stronger synergy between Capacity nut and Capacity soc than rural areas, with a Pearson coefficient of 0.622 in urban areas and 0.436 in rural areas. Education was the most important factor for Capacity soc , with a standardized coefficient of 0.401; distance food trade was the most important factor for Capacity env , with a standardized coefficient of 0.500. By 2100, the average score for the three capacities was expected to increase by 39.36% to 63.64%. Our results demonstrate the essence of targeted efforts in urban areas and stable international food trade for enhancing capacity of dietary sustainability to deal with climate change globally.