“Que mangerons-nous en 2050? [What will we eat in 2050?]” is a “serious game” that imagines the future of sustainable food production.
The serious game “Que mangerons-nous en 2050?” was created and developed by the association Solagro with the aim of helping local actors build their own strategy for sustainably producing food by the year 2050. The game highlights the relationships and interdependencies between food, climate, and land use. It is designed to create a space for dialogue between stakeholders (represented in the game by different players or groups of players) in order to kick-start a collaboration that will lead to attaining a sustainable food supply by 2050. The variables taken into account are: the agricultural area used (“useful agricultural area” or UAA, measured in hectares), recommended nutritional intakes (in kilocalories), and the impact of greenhouse gas emissions (in tonnes of CO2 equivalent).
The players have to reach a target score that reflects a balance of tonnes of CO2 equivalent and hectares of UAA. At the end of the workshop, participants work together to construct an action plan to facilitate a rapid implementation of the project. The game is based on the foresight report Afterres 2050, produced by Solagro in 2016. In this exploratory foresight study, the experts that were consulted (including farmers, scientists, institutions, and private citizens) agreed on a scenario for balanced food production in the year 2050. They arrived at this scenario by combining the hypotheses that seemed to be the most coherent, realistic, and sustainable. The levers for action in this scenario are changes in diet, changes in agricultural systems and practices, import-export flows with the rest of the world, and the preservation of available land. The objectives to be achieved by 2050 are as follows: a one-third reduction in overconsumption, a halving of food losses and waste, and a diet composed of one-third animal proteins and two-thirds plant proteins (which is the opposite of the proportion observed in 2010).
These objectives are achievable without any new technological breakthrough. By 2050, they will allow us to:
- halve greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and achieve carbon neutral status;
- reduce the use of phytosanitary treatments on crops by a factor of three, and the consumption of mineral nitrogen (chemical fertilisers) by a factor of two and a half;
- halve the use of water for irrigating summer crops;
- halve energy consumption, and use agricultural and woodland biomass in a way that respects the proper functioning of ecosystems.
In order to define quantified objectives, the experts used a modelling tool developed by Solagro: MoSUT (Modélisation systémique de l’usage des terres / Systemic Model of Land Use), which correlates consumption needs (expressed in tonnes of food products) with tonnes of production, and the hectares of land, yields, cubic metres of water, and tonnes of fertiliser and phytosanitary products required to achieve that production. It also calculates the impacts of food production in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
It should be noted that more and more foresight work is being done in the form of “serious games”. Although these games require a high initial investment in terms of design time, they allow actors to quickly grasp the foresight issues involved and their implications (foresight reports are often long and difficult to take on board for those who have not participated in the process). They enable organisations to begin thinking about the future and, above all, to easily understand the available levers of action and the interactions between the various stakeholders in a given territory.
This article has been translated from French by Sam Ferguson.
