Sustainable diets can reduce environmental pressure

Our food choices hold immense power. Not just over our personal health, but also for the Earth itself. Shifting towards sustainable diets can significantly combat climate change and food scarcity.

But, implementing such changes on a global scale requires delicacy due to the interconnectedness of our global food network.

Global food chain

The world’s food system is a complex, interconnected web. A shift in food demand in one corner of the globe can have far-reaching effects on people in other parts of the world, often in ways we might not initially anticipate.

“Changes in food demand in one part of the world can have cascading environmental and human welfare implications for people around the world),” said Joe DeCesaro, data analyst at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS).

Decoding the global diet shifts

To navigate the complexity of the global food system and ensure a healthy population and planet, a comprehensive shift in our global diet is needed.

DeCesaro, along with a team of international researchers, embarked on the ambitious mission to understand where and how environmental pressures might occur within global dietary shifts.

The experts analyzed four types of diets – Indian, Mediterranean, EAT-Lancet (primarily plant-based), and food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs).

Tale of four diets

The team’s findings, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, show that the Indian diet emerging as the most beneficial of the four, estimated to reduce food production-based global environmental pressure by a remarkable 20.9 percent.

On the other hand, the food-based dietary guidelines were projected to potentially increase environmental pressure by a staggering 35.2 percent.

Global food system and sustainable diets

Our global food system is a major player in environmental change. It is linked to about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and over 70% of freshwater resources.

Shifting towards a more sustainable diet – leaning away from resource-intensive foods like red meat – can decrease the environmental pressure, bring health benefits, and increase the intake of nutrient-dense foods like vegetables and legumes.

Who bears the environmental burden?

The research team’s curiosity didn’t end at understanding the impact of dietary changes. They sought to find out who would bear the environmental burden brought on by these diet shifts.

“The research was motivated originally by the question: Who’s consumption is generating the pressures of food production that are being felt by people and places around the world?” DeCesaro noted.

“Are poorer countries paying the environmental price of producing higher pressure foods that are being eaten by richer countries or vice versa? Our methods allow us to track changes in the environmental pressures from the producer to the consumer, and vice versa, in a standardized format across four pressures. Our work is quite novel in this space.”

“The Indian and FBDGs being directly from government recommendations, the Mediterranean being widely discussed for its health benefits, and the EAT-Lancet diet being developed by subject matter experts,” DeCesaro said.

Power of sustainable diets

Their findings revealed that except for the FBDGs, shifts to all other diets resulted in reductions in global cumulative pressure.

The Indian diet performed best due to its recommendation of zero red meat consumption, while food-based dietary guidelines typically suggest more red meat than countries currently consume.

However, these global pressure reductions would primarily rely on dietary shifts in higher-income countries.

“Higher-income countries’ average current diets have higher consumption quantities of most food categories than the recommended quantities in our diet scenarios,” noted DeCesaro.

Sustainable diets and lower-income countries

A shift towards more sustainable, plant-forward diets would increase environmental pressures related to food production in lower-income countries. But, DeCesaro explained that this is mainly due to the diet scenarios meeting more of their daily needs.

The researchers advocate for support from wealthier countries via access to imports of efficiently produced foods, economic development, and sharing knowledge of efficient and environmentally friendly food production practices.

At the end of the day, our decisions about what we eat are vital for reducing our environmental footprint. Nevertheless, others might pay the price for those decisions, concluded Halpern.

As global citizens, we thus share the responsibility of making informed food choices that nourish both ourselves and the world we live in.

The study is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

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