Rasmus Einarsson

I am broadly interested in resource use, resource constraints, productivity, and environmental impacts of food systems. Food systems are globally interconnected through shared land resources and international trade, and moreover also compete for resources with energy systems and forestry. In my work, I collaborate with specialists in various disciplines, aiming to generate transparent and policy-relevant insights on the past, present, and possible futures of food systems and land use. My interest in policy applications has led to several assignments as analyst or expert advisor to national authorities and international organizations.

My disciplinary background in chemical engineering and engineering physics has given me a habit of asking fundamental questions about biological and physical constraints and possibilities, such as mass and energy balances, entropy, and conversion efficiencies. I find this approach valuable as it helps to delineate the option space that is available for societal change.

I do quantitative desk research on food systems, with a particular focus on agricultural production systems, concerning land and other resource use, productivity, and environmental impacts. The research is both retrospective, aiming to understand and quantify how land use and food systems have evolved in the past, and prospective, exploring how things may be different in the future.

Much of my work is focused on European agricultural systems, where I am specialized in making use of datasets at scales from farm to subnational regions and countries to quantify resource flows in agricultural production systems. The EU is the world leader in publicly available statistics, including subnational statistics, yet many of the variables that are most relevant from an environmental standpoint (e.g., manure production and management, crop-specific fertilizer use, and crop rotations) are not directly quantified but rather have to be estimated through mathematical modeling based on agricultural statistics including livestock populations and production, crop harvests, and aggregate fertilizer use, in combination with expert judgment and various other data sources. This is the disciplinary basis on which I build analyses together with specialists in various areas.