In environmental management and sustainability there is an increasing interest in measurement and accounting of beneficial impact - as an incentive to action, as a communication tool, and to move towards a positive, constructive approach focused on opportunities rather than problems. One approach uses the metaphor of a “handprint”, complementing the notion of environmental footprints, which have been widely adopted for impact measurement and accounting. We analyse this idea by establishing core principles of handprint thinking: handprint encourages actions with positive impacts, connects to analyses of footprint reductions, but adds value to them, and addresses the issue of what action should be taken. We also identify five key decisions that need to be made in performing a (potentially quantitative) handprint assessment, related to scoping of the improvement to be made, how it is achieved, and how credit is assigned, taking into account constraints on action. A case study of the potential water footprint reduction of an average Finn demonstrates how handprint thinking can be a natural extension of footprint reduction analyses. We find that there is a diversity of possible handprint assessments that have the potential to encourage doing good. Their common foundation is “handprint thinking”.

Although many suggest that future diets should include more plant-based proteins, animal-sourced foods are unlikely to completely disappear from our diet. Grasslands yield a notable part of the world’s animal protein production, but thus far, there is no global insight into the relationship between current livestock stocking densities and the availability of grassland forage resources. This inhibits acting upon concerns over the negative effects of overgrazing in some areas and utilising the potential for increasing production in others. Previous research has examined the potential of sustainable grazing but lacks generic and observation-based methods needed to fully understand the opportunities and threats of grazing. Here we provide a novel framework and method to estimate global livestock carrying capacity and relative stocking density, i.e. the reported livestock distribution relative to the estimated carrying capacity. We first estimate the aboveground biomass that is available for grazers on grasslands and savannas based on the MODIS Net Primary Production (NPP) approach on a global scale. This information is then used to calculate reasonable livestock carrying capacities, using slopes, forest cover and animal forage requirements as restrictions. With this approach, we found that stocking rates exceed the forage provided by grasslands in northwestern Europe, midwestern United States, southern China and the African Sahel. In this study, we provide the highest resolution global datasets to date. Our results have implications for prospective global food system modelling as well as national agricultural and environmental policies. These maps and findings can assist with conservation efforts to reduce land degradation associated with overgrazing and help identify undergrazed areas for targeted sustainable intensification efforts.

Eating less livestock products can reduce agricultural resource use, but it has also been argued that a portion of livestock products does sustainably contribute to food security. Given that diet change impacts arise through modification of food production systems, evaluating such changes requires explicit modelling of system dynamics. This paper uses a novel global integrated optimisation model, “Aalto OptoFood”, to investigate changes in water use when replacing livestock protein with plant-based protein sources in human diets and reallocating associated cropland and pasture. Our findings reveal that the first cuts are the deepest – moderate reductions in livestock protein decrease water consumption more than suggested by comparing global average crop and livestock water productivities. Further reductions show diminishing returns, with no clear optimum. In terms of water use, it is beneficial to eat less livestock products, even if there is no clear case for or against universal adoption of a vegan diet.