The Present and Future Role of Rice-Animal Co-Culture Systems in Meeting Sustainable Development Goals

Rice-animal co-culture (RAC) systems are an integrated farming approach to mitigate the diverse challenges facing the food system. Studies of the production potential and ecological mechanisms of RAC systems have demonstrated natural advantages over traditional production systems. The quantification of the advantages and the potential promotion of RAC systems at regional and global scales, however, remains unclear. Writing in Earth's Future, Cui et al. (2023, ) comprehensively assessed an ecological RAC system and identified the potential benefits of global promotion using a meta-analysis. In this commentary, we contextualized Cui et al.'s (2023, ) study and further theoretically clarified the connections of RAC systems to the various sustainable development goals (SDGs) and targets, with references to the officially released list of SDG indicators. Moreover, we discussed the limitation of the current studies and pointed out some potential directions for future research to understand the present and future roles of RAC systems in meeting the multiple SDGs. Rice-animal co-culture (RAC) systems provide a potential way to mitigate the great challenge of sustainably feeding the growing world population. RAC systems would substantially improve the progress of sustainable development goal 2 (SDG2, Zero hunger) by producing more diverse food, enhancing agricultural sustainability, and increasing farmers' income and would also benefit many other sustainable development goals (SDGs), such as SDG1 (No poverty), SDG8 (Decent work and economic growth), SDG6 (Clean water and sanitation), SDG12 (Responsible consumption and production), and SDG13 (Climate action). Quantifying the contributions of RAC systems to SDGs at the goal, target, and indicator levels needs to be further explored in future studies.