Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
Economic Analysis for Food Systems Transformation: Global-Local-Global Approach
Abstract
Food systems are a major driver of planetary boundary exceedance (Richardson et al. 2023). As climate uncertainty intensifies and an increasingly affluent global population increases food demand, ambitious environmental policies are essential to sustainably manage the limited stock of natural resources. This presentation highlights how economic analysis can deepen our understanding of the market-mediated effects of conservation efforts through a global-local-global lens.
Environmental challenges, like biodiversity loss, groundwater depletion, and excessive nutrient leaching, are experienced locally. Yet their drivers often operate globally through commodity markets as global population and incomes increase. Labour markets, operating between these global and local scales, further shape the effectiveness and distributional impacts of conservation policies (Ray and Hertel 2025; Ray 2025), particularly as farm labor scarcity intensifies.
This talk draws on recent advances in economic analysis that connect global drivers to decisions by local producers at a fine spatial scale while considering the mediating impacts of sub-national markets. This approach can inform policies targeting food systems transformation while minimizing unintended economic and distributional consequences.
About the speaker
Language
English
This is a free seminar. Registration is mandatory.