Economic development worldwide is associated with the prevalence of obesity and related health problems. A study published in the journal PNAS looked at energy consumption and obesity in 4,213 adults across six continents, representing a variety of lifestyles and economies, and found that dietary intake plays a much larger role in obesity associated with economic development than does a decline in energy consumption.

On 28 July, the United Nations Food Systems Summit +4 (UNFSS+4) plenary sessions kicked off in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with a number of special sessions including by renowned experts in the field of food systems research.

The Secretary-General's Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals Report provides a global overview of progress made in the decade since the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted in 2015 and identifies areas where decisive action is needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Since 2015, progress has been made on SDG2, with reductions in child stunting and wasting and modest improvements in dietary diversity for young children, but hunger and food insecurity are worsening and small-scale producers continue to earn significantly less than their larger counterparts. The report highlights the importance of food systems transformation, among others, in achieving the 2030 Agenda.

Food systems face challenges in providing equitable, healthy diets to people around the world, supporting sustainable livelihoods, and ensuring environmental protection. A Nature Food editorial proposes a rethinking of food system-wide governance to address these issues.

Adaptation requires rapid and adaptive institutions. As the frequency of climate disasters increases, more systematic institutional adaptation is required. Here is an editorial from Nature Climate Change.

Much of the discussion on climate change associated with achieving the goal of net zero carbon dioxide emissions has tended to focus on the change in global average temperature after emissions are halted. An editorial in Communications Earth & Environment magazine suggests that even if rapid decarbonization is achieved, the long-term impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise and ocean warming, are likely to continue, and need to be taken into consideration.

As global warming progresses, the impacts of extreme heat are expected to grow even more, making it urgent to build effective early warning systems. According to an editorial in The Lancet Planetary Health, in the first two decades of the 21st century, the excess deaths from heat stroke were about 500,000 per year, of which about 250,000 were in Asia.

June 2025 was the third warmest June on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Western Europe as a whole experienced its hottest June on record, and the heatwave in mid- and late June 2025 led to "very high heat stress" conditions in a wide area, with temperatures exceeding 38°C, and "extreme heat stress" conditions in parts of Portugal, with temperatures reaching around 48°C.

Our world faces overlapping environmental, health, security, and social crises. A recent paper by the Earth4All initiative, which uses systems modeling to address the issue of overshooting human pressures on the environment, has proposed five transitional pathways: energy, food and land systems, inequality, poverty, and gender equality.