Sustainability Concern|Food Availability
Why this criterion? This criterion flags scenarios that report levels of food availability that are far beyond or below human dietary energy needs.
This is a concern, because food availability below dietary energy needs would imply the presence of hunger and food availability far beyond above human needs would imply significant overconsumption and waste.
Why this threshold? According to the FAO (2015), the Minimum Dietary Energy Requirement is 1,840 kilo calories food intake per person per day. Using a ÷0.83 conversion factor deducted from UNEP's food waste index report (UNEP, 2021), we define the lower threshold for a high concern as food availability below 2,220 kcal per person per day. The upper threshold is set to 4,000 kcal per person per day, which is the highest ever recorded regional food availability reported by FAO (2025).
The lower medium concern threshold is based on recommendations provided by the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems (Rockström, 2025), which recommends an average estimate of 2090 kcal food intake across all ages and sex. Relying on the same conversion factor as before, this implies a food availability of 2,520 kcal per person per day. The upper medium concern threshold is set to match the FAO's Maximum Dietary Energy Requirement of 3,110 kcal food intake per day, resulting in a food availability of 3,750 kcal per person per day (FAO, 2016). This estimation of the Maximum Dietary Energy Requirement followed methodology proposed by Cafiero (2014).
Based on these values, we assume the following global threshold across all years:
• Upper threshold, high concern: 4,000 kcal/cap/day
• Upper threshold, medium concern: 3,750 kcal/cap/day
• Lower threshold, medium concern: 2,520 kcal/cap/day
• Lower threshold, high concern: 2,220 kcal/cap/day
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Sources
| Identifier | Bibliographic information | Links |
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UNEP. Food Waste Index Report 2021. Technical Report, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Nairobi, March 2021. | URL |
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Johan Rockström, Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, Walter C Willett, Line J Gordon, Mario Herrero, Christina C Hicks, Daniel Mason-D’Croz, Nitya Rao, Marco Springmann, Ellen Cecilie Wright, Rina Agustina, Sumati Bajaj, Anne Charlotte Bunge, Bianca Carducci, Costanza Conti, Namukolo Covic, Jessica Fanzo, Nita G Forouhi, Matthew F Gibson, Xiao Gu, Ermias Kebreab, Claire Kremen, Amar Laila, Ramanan Laxminarayan, Theresa M Marteau, Carlos A Monteiro, Anna Norberg, Jemimah Njuki, Thais Diniz Oliveira, Wen-Harn Pan, Juan A Rivera, James P W Robinson, Marina Sundiang, Sofie te Wierik, Detlef P van Vuuren, Sonja Vermeulen, Patrick Webb, Lujain Alqodmani, Ramya Ambikapathi, Anne Barnhill, Isabel Baudish, Felicitas Beier, Damien Beillouin, Arthur H W Beusen, Jannes Breier, Charlotte Chemarin, Maksym Chepeliev, Jennifer Clapp, Wim de Vries, Ignacio Pérez-Domínguez, Natalia Estrada-Carmona, Dieter Gerten, Christopher D Golden, Sarah K Jones, Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, Marta Kozicka, Hermann Lotze-Campen, Federico Maggi, Emma Marzi, Abhijeet Mishra, Fernando Orduna-Cabrera, Alexander Popp, Lena Schulte-Uebbing, Elke Stehfest, Fiona H M Tang, Kazuaki Tsuchiya, Hannah H E Van Zanten, Willem-Jan van Zeist, Xin Zhao, and Fabrice DeClerck. The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems. The Lancet, 406(10512):1625–1700, October 2025. | DOI |
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FAO, IFAD, and WFP. The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2015. Meeting the 2015 international hunger targets: taking stock of uneven progress. Technical Report, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy, 2015. | URL |
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FAO. Food balance sheets 2010–2023. Technical Report, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy, October 2025. | DOI |
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FAO. Food security indicators. Technical Report, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy, 2016. | |
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Carlo Cafiero. Advances in hunger measurement. Traditional FAO methods and recent innovations. Technical Report, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Statistics Division, Rome, Italy, aug 2014. | URL |