Foresight research in sustainable food systems and their interconnection with the Sustainable Development Goals

Foresight research plays a key role in addressing uncertainty, informing decision making, and enhancing the relevance and credibility of policies. The scientific knowledge of foresight literature provides a better understanding of complexity, building resilience, and setting direction in a rapidly changing world. Moreover, it has contributed to achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), enabling governments and organizations to design and implement policies based on a thorough and informed approach. Nevertheless, the thematic structure of the field and its connection to SDGs are not yet known. This study uncovers the topics that best describe foresight research in sustainable food systems and identifies the interconnection between foresight field and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We applied a probabilistic and structured Topic Model analysis (Latent Dirichlet Allocation LDA) of the titles, abstracts, and keywords of the papers to identify the emergent themes and conceptualizations that closely represent and predict the field's evolution. Next, we review the most cited and groundbreaking papers to review state-the-art comprehensively. This baseline exploratory study illustrates the utility of bibliometric datasets and natural language processing methods for understanding the connection between scientific outputs (research articles) and societal goals (Sustainable Development Goals). The methodology was tested mainly on climate action SDG. The results reveal the topics through which foresight research connects with the SDGs. Identifying the relationships between scientific results and the SDGs is limited. One limitation of this study is that it does not go into depth when interpreting this relationship. A future line of research would be to provide a better understanding of how and why specific topics in foresight exhibit a positive or negative relationship with certain SDGs. That is, advance on the debate on the kind of scientific outputs that have allowed foresight scholars to establish this relationship and to whether this is the direction of the research to reduce uncertainty and improve information that contributes to societal challenges