Sustainable Land and Food Systems

A longstanding area of research is on sustainable land and food systems, primarily using empirical methods to analyze large-scale climate and land use datasets, such as my recently concluded a five-year research project on sustainable food systems in Europe, where we for the first time harmonized farm subsidy spending across member states by location and purpose, drawn from 16 million individual payments (Nicholas et al., 2021, Patterns). We used these data to show that at least €27 billion of EU agricultural subsidies were misspent in 2015: increasing income inequality, paying polluters, and directing rural development funds to cities (Scown, Brady, and Nicholas, 2020, One Earth).