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Food production covers the most basic human need, and simultaneously isthe main driver of anthropogenic environmental impacts. These impactshave resulted in the transgression, during the brief period since theindustrial revolution, of the planetary boundaries defining the safeoperating space of humanity. A rich research literature quantifies thelast 60 years’ fast, heterogeneous, and often unfair development in foodsupply and related environmental impacts, and how these depend onagro-climatic factors, technology, and trade flows, all of which havegreatly changed but with different trajectories around the world.However, these developments lack an integrated approach, and are verypoorly quantified before 1961. WHEP will bridge these knowledge gaps,assessing “who has eaten the planet” by answering the questions:

What are the environmental impacts of food production since 1850?

What is the role of trade in food supply and in displacing theresponsibilities for these impacts?

How are impacts related to planetary boundaries, food supply andinequality?

These highly ambitious goals are addressed by four objectives:

1. Constructing a consolidated global country-level annual database onagricultural production and management, using massive data collationin combination with modeling.
2. Estimating the environmental impacts: greenhouse gas emissions andcarbon, land, water, nitrogen, and phosphorus through spatiallyexplicit, integrated, dynamic modeling.
3. Calculating product footprints and tracing them along internationaltrade chains.
4. Analyzing the observed trajectories in the safe and just operatingspace, by assessing the drivers, and how impacts at the productionand consumption levels are related to fair and healthy supply. Thisground-breaking research will shed new light on the environmentalhistory of food, opening up many new research frontiers, andproviding necessary information to design fair and sustainablepolicies.

You can also visit theEuropean projectsite.

The WHEP project heavily relies on data. We use the R programminglanguage. This repository is built as an R package containingfunctionality that we think might be useful to share to others as partof the project. This will also include functions for easily downloadingthe data gathered by the project.

The package is under constant development. Initial stable releases areavailable from both CRAN andR-universe.

You can install the stable version on CRAN:

install.packages('whep')

If you want the development version ofwhep, you can:

# Install from GitHubpak::pak("eduaguilera/whep")# Install from R-universeinstall.packages("whep",repos= c("https://eduaguilera.r-universe.dev","https://cloud.r-project.org"))

You can read more about the package’s functionalities from thedocumentation at thereferencepage.

We try to follow best coding practices, specifically focused on Rpackage creation. The process is roughly summarized in:

• Use git. Work on your own branch.
• Track dependencies usingrenv R package.
• Add your new functionality insideR/ directory as functions.
• Add function documentation.
• Write clean code. FollowTidyverse styleguide.
• Write tests for your code.
• Create pull requests. Ask for review.

The project is starting withcontributors that are still learningabout coding and best practices. For this reason, if you’reinexperienced, we have written asmall free online bookexplaining most of the things you need from the previous steps, coveringboth git and R package development. You can directlyaccess ithere. Anyone iswelcome to contribute, but we highly recommend to go through this guideto become familiar with the workflow if you are still not used to it.