Food production and consumption need to substantially change to meet global environmental and public health goals. Increasing grain legume consumption in most countries is key to providing nourishing food for all while contributing to cropping system sustainability with relatively low environmental impact. But what actions have the potential to increase such consumption? The wide knowledge of how to cultivate grain legumes among Swedish farmers, low current consumption in most of the population, and prior shifts in dietary patterns make Sweden an interesting context for studying the potential increase of grain legumes in diets. We identify system-level actions in peer-reviewed and grey literature with the potential to increase grain legume consumption and apply the leverage points framework to evaluate the transformative potential of these actions for the food system in Sweden. Our findings show that most actions suggested in the literature so far focus on increased production, while fewer suggestions integrate production and consumption. Few actions address the deeper leverage points with most transformative potential compared with those with less transformative potential. We qualitatively analyze the actions and develop a chain of leverage illustrating how several actions together could be combined to support change at the deepest leverage point, creating social norms for the consumption of healthy foods. The chain includes developing new tools, facilities and products; changing standards; building feedback loops; changing the food environment; building new information flows between actors; and reforming the value chain. To implement the actions identified in this analysis, a range of value chain actors and supportive policies at the national and European Union levels will be needed.

Systems thinking provides a comprehensive range of theories and methods that are useful for understanding and managing sustainability challenges. Biodiversity conservation is riddled with complex interactions between science, society and myriad interacting systems through temporal and spatial scales. This article presents a synthetic analysis of the history of systems thinking from a genealogical perspective, drawing from hard and soft systems thinking, and resilience and social-ecological systems. Using the anchor point of system leverage points and system characteristics (parameters, feedbacks, design and intent), we employ a diversity of examples to illustrate their relevance to multiple biodiversity related problems. We conclude by illustrating the opportunities for systems thinking to bridge epistemic divides with multiple biodiversity actors working towards conservation outcomes. Systems thinking can support more integrative biodiversity interventions, as they provide a pluralistic set of tools for bridging knowledges and disciplines, which can be useful to create new shared understandings of how to conserve biodiversity.