Reducing the UK’s food footprint: Demand-side action for more palatable food emissions

Alice Garvey, Jonathan Norman and John Barrett

Key findings

• Our demand for food drives greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions throughout the food supply chain including from agriculture, food processing and transportation. In the UK this demand is projected to grow towards 2050 as a function of high current levels of demand and population growth.
• Agriculture and land use accounts for 11% of the UK’s territorial GHG emissions. Our research shows that imported food adds 20 MtCO2e to the UK’s food footprint: equivalent to around half the emissions from domestic production. Thus, action to reduce demand in UK food-related emissions would have an impact at a global scale.

• We show that transformative demand-side scenarios could reduce the UK’s absolute annual territorial GHG emissions from the food system by 52% (2017–2050), and consumption emissions by as much as 49%.
• We evaluate the potential of transitions to more plant-based diets, following UK government guidance on calorific intake, and reducing food waste.
• Sustainable dietary change carries benefits for personal as well as planetary health, and there is a current culture of acceptability around low-carbon diets. However, there are also a number of structural issues affecting the UK food system, including food poverty and carbon leakage, which require careful and equitable policy design.
• Whilst mitigation of food system emissions depends on changing consumption, this is not the sole responsibility of the consumer – therefore we outline a number of policy options towards sustainable dietary change.

Transforming the UK’s food footprint

The agriculture and land use sector represents 11% of the UK’s territorial GHG emissions, and is expected to be a growth sector by 2050 (Climate Change Committee, 2018). Substantial impacts from food demand are also seen in the manufacturing and transport sectors. Global GHG emissions from food production are expected to increase by 50-90% without mitigation, driven by population and income growth worldwide (Willett et al., 2019).

Mitigation of food-related emissions in the UK will be a critical action to achieve legislated carbon budgets aligned with net-zero. The UK’s consumption-based food emissions are 52% greater than its territorial account, meaning action in this area is important in terms of taking global responsibility.

The territorial and consumption-based impact is driven by final demand for food; changing the composition and level of this final demand will be an important action to reach net-zero consistent food emissions in the UK. Demand-side change has important benefits in addressing consumption-based emissions by improving resource efficiency and changing both the quantity and structure of demand for imported goods (Owen et al., 2018). Figure 2 outlines the consumption-based emissions flows constituting UK final food demand, highlighting the role of imported products in the UK’s food-related emissions.

We assessed the mitigation potential of three dietary change options using a hybrid physical input-output food system model, namely: dietary transitions towards plant-based consumption, following government dietary recommendations on calorific intake, and reducing food waste (Garvey et al., 2021). The analysis revealed that transformative demand-side scenarios of the UK food system could reduce absolute annual territorial GHG emissions by 52% (2017–2050), with dietary transitions being the single most effective measure, achieving reductions of 22–44% (see Figure 3).

Promoting dietary change through policy

The recent publication of the National Food Strategy, an independent review into the UK food system, put forward a number of recommendations to improve the health and environmental standards of UK diets (National Food Strategy, 2021). But little policy response has been forthcoming, and responsibility for UK food policy is distributed between 16 government departments, complicating action (Parsons, 2020).

Dietary change is often viewed as problematic to encourage via policy, given the perception of dietary choice as a fundamental human right. Recent attitudes and trends favouring low-carbon diets suggest a level of acceptability around policy interventions, however there are questions of both the longevity of interest in following vegan diets for instance (i.e. whether it is a dietary ‘fad’) and the reliability of data on these recent trends. The BAU scenario (as in Figure 2), assumes that such trends towards plant-based consumption continue towards 2050.

Demand-side action on consumption should not be assumed as the sole responsibility of consumers.”

Acceptability will depend on the type of policy action. There is no precedent for moderating calorific intake levels by design (apart from through rationing in exceptional wartime conditions), though there are a number of strategies in place to address obesity. Discussion of changing existing diets also becomes problematic from a social justice perspective given the UK population’s dietary needs are not being universally met, with food bank use up 74% against 2016 levels (Crew, 2021). Ultra-processed, high calorie foods are generally cheaper (Vandevijvere et al., 2020), and often lower carbon, but with little nutritional value. For instance one study found that some of the lowest emissions values were ‘associated with foods of low nutritional value, including sweets’ (Drewnowski et al., 2015). The problem is therefore in achieving an affordable and nutritious low carbon diet. Any food policy will need to take into account regressive distributional effects, as is much debated in the context of meat taxation. However, many options to reduce the emissions intensity of UK diets carry co-benefits for personal as well as planetary health. There could also be cost savings for consumers; Springmann et al. (2021) show that a healthy and sustainable balanced diet could cost up to a third less in countries like the UK compared to current diets.

Existing policies disproportionately focus on either the food production system or food waste. For instance, in a COP26 pledge of 45 countries the UK Government committed to invest in sustainable farming (Defra and BEIS, 2021). By contrast, policies on the consumption side are more limited. Reducing food waste has been a relatively uncontroversial option, given its characterisation as a ‘moral scandal’, therefore policy in this area is reasonably well developed (HM Government, 2018). Other recent policy has circulated around the role of packaging waste, despite the fact this tends to account for only 7% of the climate impact of food (Garnett, 2011). There is also a trade-off between having enough packaging to preserve food, whilst avoiding excess material waste. A whole food systems policy approach is required to ensure policy is concentrated on the most effective areas of action.

A number of actions beyond traditional policy instruments are also available and can involve the application of new technologies. Several apps make use of Life Cycle Assessment data to allow consumers to undertake personal carbon tracking; for instance, ‘Evocco’ tracks the carbon footprint of shopping by analysing receipt data (Evocco, 2021). Food waste apps such as Olio, Karma and Too Good To Go allow their users to buy cheap waste food from businesses or other consumers (Which?, 2021). New ‘smart bins’ which track the volume and composition of wasted food, and ‘smart fridges’ are also proposed steps to reduce food waste, particularly in commercial settings (Fleming, 2020). Blockchain technologies are also being applied to the food supply chain to trace the origins and environmental impact of imported food products (Kamilaris et al., 2019). Funding could broadly support the use of such technologies, and be directed towards organisations that carry out charitable food redistribution, for instance FareShare.

The number of prospective policy options to act on the food system (Table 1) highlight that action on final demand is not necessarily the sole responsibility of the consumer, and that consideration should be given to the availability and accessibility of different food types as part of the UK’s food ‘infrastructure’. For example, the recent EU Farm to Fork Strategy includes many of these policy options, and broadly aims to ‘improve the availability and price of sustainable food’ (European Commission, 2020).

This briefing report is based on our research: Towards net zero nutrition: the contribution of demand-side change to mitigating UK food emissions.

The full paper is open access:

Garvey, A., Norman, J.B., Owen, A. and Barrett, J., 2021. Towards net zero nutrition: the contribution of demand-side change to mitigating UK food emissions. Journal of Cleaner Production, 290: 125672. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.125672Opens in a new tab 

References

Banner photo credit: Alireza Attari on Unsplash