The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) emphasize the need to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture (SDG2). They also highlight the need to shift towards responsible consumption and production practices throughout the food system (SDG12). On a European level, the Farm to Fork Strategy forms a central component of the European Green Deal and aims to make the European food systems more sustainable by 2030. Various regional and national policies have also recognized the need to renew food systems, and different grassroot initiatives aim to support local changes in food production and consumption.

Food systems serve a basic human need – nutrition – and has a major economic, social and environmental importance. For example, some 13 million enterprises and 29 million workers produce, process, distribute, prepare and sell food and beverages in the EU (EPRS, 2020). The food and drink industry is the largest manufacturing sector in the EU economy. Agriculture is the source of 11% of all greenhouse gases emitted in the EU, and it remains a significant contributor to biodiversity and habitat loss and to the emissions of harmful air pollutants, such as ammonia as well as the most significant pressure impacting both surface and groundwaters (EEA, 2017, 2024). Moreover, unhealthy diets, exposure to chemical residues in food and packaging, and contamination of drinking water affect human health.

A rich array of issues needs to be addressed in order to successfully guide the food systems towards a more sustainable direction. Abundant research has focused on identifying the key components of change (Eakin et al., 2017; EEA, 2017; Kennedy et al., 2021; Maynard et al., 2020), including environmental issues of food production and consumption, such as combating climate change and biodiversity loss, resource overuse, and promoting circular economy. Social well-being also plays a crucial role, encompassing fair working conditions throughout the food chain, promoting healthy diets for all, and reducing food waste. Furthermore, ensuring economic viability of food systems involves keeping agriculture and aquaculture competitive and resilient, supporting farmers and fishers in adopting sustainable practices, and generating new economic opportunities through regeneration and renewal.

This complexity and diversity of issues pose a challenge for monitoring and assessing change but at the same time they make food systems an interesting case. The overall goal of this scoping review is to support the development of sustainability transition monitoring. More specifically, the aim is to build a prototype framework featuring criteria, characteristics, and logic for monitoring systemic changes in food systems.

To achieve this, the report reviews various indicator sets, academic studies and case reports. It uses and builds on previous EEA and ETC ST (European Topic Centre on Sustainability Transition) work on food systems sustainability measurement and assessment, while reviewing a variety of other selected cases. Particular emphasis is given to comprehensive or “holistic” indicator frameworks that aim to characterize drivers and dynamics of systemic change throughout the food value chain, covering the agriculture, aquaculture, and fisheries sectors. Sustainability indices aiming to aggregate multidimensional issues into a single figure are not considered here.

This study employs a scoping study approach aiming for a wide-based overall picture. Instead of conducting a systematic review focused on specific topics, perspectives or approaches, or an analysis delving deep into individual cases or methods, it aims to select and compare a diverse set of cases that illustrate different, potentially useful ways to use indicators to describe food systems transitions. Food systems’ studies are considered a promising field that is highly relevant for sustainability transition, but that remains relatively uncharted. For example, energy or transportation systems are much more often addressed by transition studies and have more advanced and internationally established reporting and monitoring schemes.

The scoping utilised the snowballing method, drawing on existing ETC work (e.g. Lorenz et al., 2024; Haraldsson et al., 2024) and team members’ expert knowledge on relevant publications to review. The project team initiated the mapping based on previous ETC ST work and other pertinent reports suggested by EEA project managers (Chapter 2). Selection criterion during the pre-screening phase included the capability to describe food systems in a comprehensive manner, potential for cross-country comparisons, policy relevance and data availability. The chosen cases prioritize diversity in conceptual backgrounds, institutional settings, and data sources, while avoiding overlaps.

The list of pre-screened cases is presented in Annex 1: From this list, the 18 most prominent and promising cases were selected for analysis. A set of criteria to evaluate the selected cases was developed, aiming to capture the essence of food systems transition (Chapter 3). The criteria emphasize (i) the elements of food
systems identified, (ii) the relationships between the elements, and (iii) sustainability considerations. Based on the evaluation, concrete proposals for food systems transition indicators are made (Chapter 4). It should be noted that the main bulk of proposed indicators are already in use and represent readily
available cross-national and reliable data. This is supplemented with the project team’s indicator proposals per evaluation criteria. The selection also indirectly highlights further development needs and data gaps – various experimental indicators currently not capable of providing reliable cross-national picture exist.

Overall, the challenges and opportunities of sustainability transition monitoring faced in the food sector provide lessons applicable to other sectors as well. Lessons for developing the European state of the environment reporting beyond 2025 are drawn in Chapter 5.