Food Systems, Pollution, and Planetary Boundaries

ECH Editorial Team: From your perspective as an environmental scientist, how relevant is the EAT-Lancet Report for understanding why current food systems are failing both people and the planet?

Thilo Hofmann: The report highlights that food systems are the biggest pressure on Planet Earth. They are major drivers for climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and soil degradation. It makes clear that unsustainable agriculture affects both planetary health and human wellbeing. Understanding these interconnected pressures is essential to designing food systems that are safe, resilient, and sustainable.

ECH Editorial Team: By 2050, the world will need to feed almost 10 billion people. It may seem obvious to optimise agriculture with fertilisers and pesticides – but this approach is, of course, too short-sighted to ensure long-term sustainability. Why is this, and what would be the alternative?

Thilo Hofmann: While fertilisers and pesticides can raise yields in the short term, their excessive use erodes the ecological foundations of agriculture. Soil degradation, water pollution, and biodiversity loss ultimately undermine productivity and resilience. Feeding a global population of around 10 billion is possible, but not through further land expansion, as agriculture already drives much deforestation. Plant protection products therefore remain important, yet their use must be carefully managed. The key challenges lie in optimising fertiliser and pesticide use, rethinking diets and meat consumption, and strengthening ecological processes to reduce environmental impacts.

ECH Editorial Team: The EAT-Lancet Report emphasizes closing nutrient cycles to make food production more sustainable. How realistic is this goal when persistent chemicals like microplastics and PFAS are accumulating in agricultural soils?

Thilo Hofmann: Closing nutrient cycles is an important and necessary goal for sustainable food production, but it becomes far more complex when persistent contaminants are considered. Organic wastes such as manure, compost, or sewage sludge are essential for recycling nutrients, yet they increasingly carry substances such as pharmaceuticals, microplastics, PFAS, and other chemicals into agricultural soils. This does not invalidate nutrient cycling, but it challenges any simplistic view of circularity as an unqualified good. Nutrients can be reused, while contaminants tend to accumulate over time. Sustainable nutrient cycling therefore requires much stricter upstream control of pollutants, careful assessment of recycled inputs, and regulatory frameworks that explicitly better address chemicals, to avoid merely shifting environmental problems elsewhere. In Europe, for these reasons, sewage sludge will be banned in future.

ECH Editorial Team: The EAT-Lancet Report provides global recommendations for sustainable food systems. From your perspective, what are the main challenges in translating these recommendations into effective policies and practices, especially considering environmental and chemical pressures.

Thilo Hofmann: Translating global recommendations into effective policies is challenging because food systems operate within highly diverse environmental, chemical, and socio-economic contexts. Ensuring food security while respecting environmental limits already requires difficult trade-offs, and these are further complicated by chemical pressures such as nutrient losses, pesticide use, and the accumulation of persistent contaminants in soils and waters. From a scientific perspective, the key challenge is to move from universal targets to region-specific, evidence-based policies that explicitly integrate productivity, environmental protection, and long-term chemical safety rather than treating them as separate issues.

ECH Editorial Team: Food systems intersect climate, biodiversity, human health, and chemical exposure. From your perspective, why is an interdisciplinary approach essential for transforming them sustainably?

Thilo Hofmann: Food systems are complex socio-ecological and chemical systems in which climate impacts, biodiversity loss, nutrient flows, and chemical exposures are tightly interconnected. Addressing one dimension in isolation often leads to unintended consequences elsewhere. An interdisciplinary approach is therefore essential to identify trade-offs, synergies, and long-term risks, and to translate scientific knowledge into better solutions. Initiatives such as the ECH are valuable precisely because they create a framework in which in depth diciplinary research can be reflected and integrated to inform more coherent and sustainable food system transformations.