New 2025 EAT-Lancet vision calls for justice in healthy and sustainable food systems
We need just and fair food systems for all.
On 3 October 2025, the EAT-Lancet Commission released a new report on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems. The report follows six years after the first EAT-Lancet Commission (2019) which proposed a “Planetary Health Diet” vision, capable of sustainably nourishing ten billion people within Earth’s environmental limits. This 2.0 report builds on the previous findings, with a new addition. It places justice at the centre of all food systems transformations, in the evidence and recommendations.
The original EAT-Lancet model, started with defining a healthy diet, and examining its implications for five of the nine planetary boundaries, namely, climate, land, freshwater, nutrient cycling and biodiversity, which collectively served as operating limits to ensure long-term environmental stability. The 2.0 report not just extends this analysis to all nine planetary boundaries, but additionally includes a social lens, to better understand the levels of equity or inequity at play.
“Given global inequality in the distribution of nutritious and sustainable food, more is needed to make sure that the benefits of improved food systems are equally felt. The new recommended diets were considered through a justice lens, unpacking how the benefits and burdens were shared across regions and across diverse communities,” said NISD Director and EAT-Lancet author Prof Nitya Rao.
The inclusion of social justice is pressing given that the global food system is both a source and a symptom of injustice. 2.8 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet globally, despite enough food being produced to feed the global population. Roughly a third of food is wasted. Around a billion workers in food systems earn below a living wage. Smallholder farmers, especially in the Global South, often bear the highest risks and reap the smallest rewards in value chains dominated by a handful of global agribusinesses. Meanwhile, dietary transitions toward ultra-processed, high-meat diets continue in wealthy nations, widening health inequalities and driving planetary degradation that disproportionately affect the poor.
The intervening years between the two reports have exposed the fragility and inequity of global food supply chains, through events such as COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine and increasing climate shocks. Vulnerability to these shocks has not been equally distributed, and resilience efforts require an equity lens.
Alongside healthy diets and sustainable production, the report therefore calls for transitions to food systems that are socially just; where fairness, inclusion, and dignity are treated as equally essential as nutrient balance and environmental impacts.
The report includes these justice components in three overall themes; firstly, by defining justice and building representation in food systems; secondly, by framing planetary health diets as a right and; finally by the inclusion of social foundations to guide fair and just transitions to nutritious and sustainable food systems.
1: Defining justice and building representation
Justice is considered across the EAT-Lancet report through multiple dimensions and metrics. These include:
- Recognition: ensuring that diverse knowledge systems, cultural traditions, and identities are valued in shaping food futures.
- Representation: giving voice to those historically marginalised in decision-making, from farm workers to Indigenous communities.
- Distribution: addressing the inequitable allocation of resources, power, and risks across the food system. Agency and food sovereignty: the ability of communities to make autonomous choices about what and how they produce and eat.
This multi-dimensional framing moves beyond being solely outcome based, to include consideration of who participates, how diverse voices are heard, and the norms which define sustainability across populations. The 2025 Commission is also notably more diverse than its predecessor geographically, culturally, and cross-disciplinarily. The Commission team now hail from six continents, bringing perspectives from Africa, Latin America, and South Asia that were under-represented in the previous report.
Including this greater representation feeds into a more diverse conceptualisation of what it means to be healthy or sustainable. While many traditional diets across the world already align closely with planetary health principles they have been undervalued in global nutrition discourse. Recognising the value in these broader range of diets therefore reframes the goal from changing what most people eat, to protecting and supporting a range of culturally important diets that already work.
2: Healthy diets as a social right and responsibility
The Commission’s renewed call for a Planetary Health Diet pushes for a predominantly plant-based, flexitarian approach that could avert up to 15 million premature deaths annually and cut food-system emissions by half. A new addition in the 2.0 commission is that the importance of equitable access to the Planetary Health Diet is not just a recommendation but a right of all people.
The report articulates four rights and one responsibility that outline the ethics in food systems:
- The right to a healthy diet: everyone, everywhere, should have access to nutritious, culturally acceptable food.
- The right to a healthy environment: no community should suffer environmental harm from food production or waste.
- The right to decent work: those who feed the world deserve fair pay and safe conditions.
- The right to freedom of expression, culture, and agency: preserving dietary heritage and self-determination in food choices.
- The responsibility to consume sustainably: especially among high-income groups whose consumption drives ecological overshoot.
This inclusion in the 2.0 report moves the recommendations from encouraging personal choice to instead foster collective responsibility for just, healthy and sustainable food systems. It operationalises justice through human rights frameworks, drawing particularly on the right to food, right to decent work and right to a clean and healthy environment.
3: Safe operating justice boundaries
Building on the previous report’s push for food systems to operate within planetary boundaries, the 2.0 report also argues that food systems must also remain within “justice boundaries”. These new justice boundaries provide metrics for the social conditions for humanity to operate within to enable transitions to fairer food systems.
Including justice boundaries has two implications. Firstly, it makes social sustainability measurable and accountable. For instance, tracking and pushing for change across justice indicators such as living wages, land rights, representation in governance, and the affordability of a healthy or nutritious diet. Secondly, this approach better ensures the deployment of environmental interventions that protect or improve social equality in food systems.
When including these justice considerations, the new commission finds that only 1% of the world’s population are living within safe and just boundaries for food systems. Subsequently, the report argues that we cannot achieve planetary health without building flexibility in diets and protecting the world’s poorest.
By embedding justice as a boundary, the report reframes objectives for food-system transformation. For instance, agricultural policy must now be judged not only on yield or efficiency but on whether it delivers fair livelihoods and equitable access to land and markets. Similarly, trade policy must consider how it affects producer welfare and corporate accountability must include decent work and transparent supply chains. Supporting all of this research and innovation must prioritise inclusivity, co-designing technologies and including equitable returns by design.
Towards a just food future
A key component of the EAT-Lancet Commission 2.0 is that environmental transformation in food systems must also be socially transformative. This approach also ensures that food system justice is not something that can be pursued separately or after environmental improvements but a condition that makes sustainability possible.
This post was written by Matt Heaton and Nitya Rao.