“Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods, such as coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, and animal-sourced foods produced sustainably in low greenhouse gas emission systems, present major opportunities for adaptation to and limiting Climate Change.”
Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest report titled Climate Change and Land describes the extent to which agriculture, deforestation and other types of land use are significantly adding to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The report underlines, among many issues, the fact that climate change touches every aspect of food security from availability, access, utilisation to stability, while highlighting the importance of plant-based proteins in balanced diets.
This report is a clear example of the urgent need to include sustainable land management and nutrition into the climate change conversation, topics the PROTEIN2FOOD project has been working on extensively since 2015. In its final year, the project has introduced new varieties of protein-rich and high-quality protein crops, which have been adapted to various European climates to decrease the environmental issues related to certain crops, developing innovative and resource efficient methods to obtain new high-quality protein ingredients and producing nutritionally sound plant-based prototypes high in protein content and quality.