Sustainable Development Goals and Agro-Food System: the Case Study of the Future Food Institute

In 2015, the United Nations Member States adopted the 2030 Agenda, which sets out a 15-year plan to achieve 17 different Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The aim is at “ending poverty, protecting the planet and ensuring prosperity for all”, providing a holistic and multidimensional view on development. To implement the SDGs, policies need to take account of the interactions among them, minimizing the negative and enhancing the positive ones. This is necessary for avoiding cross-cutting impacts and diverging results, how it happened so far. It is time to search for a key element, transversal to the whole SDGs, able to create interactions and to avoid the aforementioned trade-offs. The agro- food system can play this role, specifically for food security, nutritional and cultural diversity, ecological long-term stability, and climate-smart systems. According to these prerequisites, this paper aims at presenting the case study of the Future Food Institute that developed an open source tool (Food for Earth), still in elaboration phase, in order to model the climate crisis and regenerate the planet, starting from food. This is composed of five innovation areas (Food diplomacy, Circular living, Climate smart ecosystems, Food identity and Prosperity), which involve at different levels the 2030 Agenda SDGs, and four action tools (Humana Communitas, Platforms, Models, and Metrics) to analyse and customize them on some specific cases. Food for Earth may be a very important instrument for policymakers, food authorities, food managers, local governments, etc., who are seeking solutions to environmental problems that require behavioural change.