Tracing the synergies and trade-off between the global food security and biodiversity

Feeding a growing global population while limiting biodiversity loss remains a central challenge for sustainable development. Although biodiversity decline and food availability have been widely studied, their combined trajectories and trade-offs at the national scale are not well quantified. This study integrates measures of biodiversity intactness and food security to examine long-term national trajectories from 1970 to 2014, together with future emission scenarios. Substantial variation exists across countries, alongside a persistent trade-off between food security gains and biodiversity conservation. Countries such as Norway and Canada remain closest to sustainability, combining relatively high biodiversity intactness with adequate food availability. In contrast, several countries in the Global South, including Bangladesh, Angola, and Mongolia, remain far from the sustainability frontier due to low food availability, biodiversity loss, or both. Large agricultural and economic producers, such as China, India, and Brazil, exhibit predominantly horizontal or downward-sloping trajectories, indicating that increases in food availability have occurred alongside declines in biodiversity intactness. Over the period 1970-2014, countries with sustained improvements in food security show a consistent temporal imbalance between nutritional gains and biodiversity outcomes. Across China, India, Brazil, biodiversity losses offset approximately 30-60% of food-security gains. In these countries, positive contributions from food security accumulate over time while biodiversity contributions remain persistently negative. Assessing food availability alongside biodiversity therefore provides a more complete assessment of sustainability outcomes. Placing national food-system trajectories within a planetary-boundaries framework helps identify pathways that meet nutritional requirements without exceeding limits of ecological change.