Mapping hazards to the global food system

Abstract

Environmental hazards associated with the global food system threaten societal integrity. Yet, there is a major data gap in the global understanding of how the prevalence of hazards is changing over time, how different classes of hazard are distributed, and whether the combined literature represents hazard prevalence equitably across research, policy and legislation, and news. Here, we explore this data gap, leveraging global research, policy, and news databases. We reveal increasing attention on food system hazards over time, in line with major geopolitical events. Coverage on environmental hazards is not distributed equally geographically, and media attention does not match research and policy evidence focus. Climate change and water scarcity in particular receive substantial attention across all source types, whilst, for example biodiversity loss, genetic erosion, or harmful algal blooms receive much less. Environmental, financial and food systems sustainability damage due to hazard neglect should be avoided and a first step is to understand, map, and quantify biases in focus.