Background The global food system is inflicting substantial environmental harm, necessitating a shift towards more environmentally sustainable food consumption practices. Policy interventions, for ...example, information campaigns, taxes and subsidies and changes in the choice context are essential to stimulate sustainable change, but their effectiveness in achieving environmental goals remains inadequately understood. Existing literature lacks a comprehensive synthesis of evidence on the role of public policies in promoting sustainable food consumption. Our systematic map addressed this gap by collecting and categorising research evidence on public policy interventions aimed at establishing environmentally sustainable food consumption patterns, in order to answer the primary research question: What evidence exists on the effects of public policy interventions for achieving environmentally sustainable food consumption? Methods Searches for relevant records (in English) were performed in WoS, Scopus, ASSIA, ProQuest Dissertation and Theses, EconLit, Google Scholar and in bibliographies of relevant reviews. A grey literature search was also performed on 28 specialist websites (searches were made in the original language of the webpages and publications in English, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian were eligible) and Google Scholar (search in English). Screening was performed at title/abstract and full-text levels, with machine learning-aided priority screening at title/abstract level. Eligibility criteria encompassed settings, interventions (public policies on sustainable food consumption), target groups and outcomes. No critical appraisal of study validity was conducted. Data coding covered bibliographic details, study characteristics, intervention types and outcomes. Evidence was categorised into intervention types and subcategories. Visual representation utilised bar plots, diagrams, heatmaps and an evidence atlas. This produced a comprehensive overview of effects of public policy interventions on sustainable food consumption patterns. Review findings The evidence base included 227 articles (267 interventions), with 92% of studies in high-income countries and only 4% in low-income countries. Quantitative studies dominated (83%), followed by mixed methods (16%) and qualitative studies (1%). Most interventions were information-based and 50% of reviewed studies looked at labels. Information campaigns/education interventions constituted 10% of the sample, and menu design changes and restriction/editing of choice context 8% each. Market-based interventions represented 13% of total interventions, of which two-thirds were taxes. Administrative interventions were rare (< 1%). Proxies for environmental impact (85%) were more frequent outcome measures than direct impacts (15%). Animal-source food consumption was commonly used (19%) for effects of interventions on, for example, greenhouse gas emissions. Most studies used stated preferences (61%) to evaluate interventions. Conclusions The literature assessing policies for sustainable food consumption is dominated by studies on non-intrusive policy instruments; labels, information campaigns, menu design changes and editing choice contexts. There is a strong need for research on sustainable food policies to leave the lab and enter the real world, which will require support and cooperation of public and private sector stakeholders. Impact evaluations of large-scale interventions require scaling-up of available research funding and stronger multidisciplinary research, including collaborations with industry and other societal actors. Future research in this field should also go beyond the European and North American context, to obtain evidence on how to counteract increasing environmental pressures from food consumption worldwide. Keywords: Biodiversity loss, Climate change, Environmental impacts, Greenhouse gas emissions, Policy intervention, Sustainable consumption, Sustainable diets, Sustainable food systems, Demand-side interventions
Background The global food system is causing considerable environmental harm. A transition towards more sustainable consumption is needed. Targeted public policy interventions are crucial for ...stimulating such transition. While there is extensive research about the promotion of more environmentally sustainable food consumption, this knowledge is scattered across different sources. This systematic map aims to collate and describe the available evidence on public policy interventions such as laws, directives, taxes and information campaigns, for achieving sustainable food consumption patterns. Methods We will search bibliographic databases, specialist websites, Google Scholar and bibliographies of relevant reviews. Searches for academic literature will be performed in English, while searches for grey literature will be performed in English, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. Screening, including consistency checking exercises, will be done at two levels: title and abstract, and full text. We will use machine learning algorithms to support screening at the title and abstract level. Coding and meta-data extraction will include bibliographic information, policy details and context, and measured environmental outcome(s). The evidence base will be summarised narratively using tables and graphs and presented as an online interactive searchable database and a website that will allow for visualisation, filtering and exploring systematic map findings, knowledge gaps and clusters. Keywords: Biodiversity loss, Climate change, Environmental impacts, Greenhouse gas emissions, Public policy, Sustainable consumption, Sustainable diets
Secure land access is vital for Myanmar's upland households, who rely on crops and forests to meet their subsistence needs. But recent land reforms threaten to undermine customary tenure and land-use ...practices in Myanmar. This paper combines income accounting methods with access theory to assess how new legislation may affect four Chin communities in the country's north-west. Our assessment of 94 households' land-access mechanisms and economic benefits from different types of land reveals existing land-access inequalities among Chin households and demonstrates communities' continued dependence on environmental resources, especially those from swidden fields, home gardens and forests. A majority of households would lose all of their land-derived income, if they were denied access to communities' customarily governed land, e.g., under the Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Land Management Law. Policy stakeholders should therefore intervene, to alleviate land-access inequalities among Chin households and to direct Myanmar's land-system dynamics onto more just development trajectories.
Livelihoods and agrarian change processes across upland South-East Asia have been explored for decades. Yet, knowledge gaps remain about contemporary livelihood strategies and land dependence in ...areas previously inaccessible to academic research, such as in upland Myanmar. Moreover, new strands of inquiry arise with continued globalisation, e.g., into the effects of remittances and labour migration on household incomes and livelihoods in distant upland areas. This study applied clustering techniques to income accounts of 94 households from northern Chin State, Myanmar to: (i) Identify households’ livelihood strategies; (ii) assess their dependence on access to land and natural resources; and (iii) compare absolute and relative incomes across strategies. We show that households engaged in six relatively distinct livelihood strategies: Relying primarily on own farming activities; making a living off the land with mixed income from agriculture and forest resources; engaging in wage employment; living from remittances; practicing non-forest tree husbandry; or engaging in self-employed business activities. We found significant income inequalities across clusters, with households engaging in remittance and wage-oriented livelihood strategies realizing higher incomes than those primarily involved in land-based activities. Our findings point to differentiated vulnerabilities associated with the identified livelihood strategies—to climate risks, shifting land-governance regimes and labour market forces.
The metric governing the trade-off between different greenhouse gases in the Kyoto Protocol, the Global Warming Potentials (GWPs), has received ample critique from both scientific and economic points ...of view. Here we use an integrated climate-economic optimization model to estimate the cost-effective trade-off between CO2, CH4 and N2O when meeting a temperature stabilization target. We then estimate the increased cost from using GWPs when meeting the same temperature target. Although the efficient valuation of the gases differs significantly from their respective GWPs, the potential economic benefit of valuing them in a more correct way amounts to 3.8 percent of the overall costs of meeting the temperature stabilization target in the base case. In absolute value, this corresponds to an additional net present value cost of US$2000100 billion. To corroborate our findings we perform a Monte Carlo-analysis where several key parameters are randomly varied simultaneously. The result from this exercise shows that our main result is robust to a wide range of changes in the key parameter values, giving a median economic loss from using GWPs of 4.2 percent.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
The destruction of the Amazon is a major global environmental issue, not only because of greenhouse gas emissions or direct impacts on biodiversity and livelihoods, but also due to the forest's role ...as a tipping element in the Earth System. With nearly a fifth of the Amazon already lost, there are already signs of an imminent forest dieback process that risks transforming much of the rainforest into a drier ecosystem, with climatic implications across the globe. There is a large body of literature on the underlying drivers of Amazon deforestation. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the behavioral and institutional microfoundations of change. Fundamental issues concerning cooperation, as well as the mechanisms facilitating or hampering such actions, can play a much more central role in attempts to unravel and address Amazon deforestation. We thus present the issue of preventing the Amazon biome from crossing a biophysical tipping point as a large-scale collective action problem. Drawing from collective action theory, we apply a novel analytical framework on Amazon conservation, identifying six variables that synthesize relevant collective action stressors and facilitators: information, accountability, harmony of interests, horizontal trust, knowledge about consequences, and sense of responsibility. Drawing upon literature and data, we assess Amazon deforestation and conservation through our heuristic lens, showing that while growing transparency has made information availability a collective action facilitator, lack of accountability, distrust among actors, and little sense of responsibility for halting deforestation remain key stressors. We finalize by discussing interventions that can help break the gridlock.
•Amazon forest conservation as analyzed through a large-scale collective action lens.•Six variables representing levers for facilitating collective action are derived.•Lack of trust and accountability and conflicts of interest remain key stressors.•Third-party interventions for fostering collective action on the Amazon are identified.
Any system to compensate countries for reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) requires a historical reference level against which future performance can be measured. Here ...we examine the possibilities Sri Lanka, a small forest country with limited data on forest carbon stocks, has to get ready for REDD+. We construct a historical reference level using available forest inventory data combined with updated 2008 and 2009 in situ carbon density data for Sri Lankan forests. Furthermore, we use a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to attribute the clearing of Sri Lankan forests in the latest years for which national forest inventory data are available, 1992-1996, to various proximate drivers and to estimate the opportunity cost of forest conservation. We estimate that baseline deforestation emissions in Sri Lanka amounted to 17 MtCO(2) yr(-1) in the 1992-1996 period, but conclude that it is challenging for Sri Lanka to produce a robust and accurate reference level due to the lack of nationally based inventories. We find that the majority of forest clearing (87%) is due to small-scale, rainfed farming, with the two other major drivers being rice and tea cultivation. Further, Sri Lankan revenues from REDD+ participation could be substantial, but they are sensitive to REDD+ policy transaction cost, highly uncertain timber revenues, and particularly the carbon price paid for emission reductions. The latter needs to be higher than $5-10/tCO(2) if there are to be substantial incentives for Sri Lanka to participate in REDD+. There is, however, a large gap in the knowledge of deforestation drivers that needs to be filled if Sri Lanka is to formulate an effective policy response to forest degradation in REDD+. For successful REDD+ implementation in Sri Lanka to happen, technological assistance, readiness assistance, and continued political momentum are crucial.
Well-aligned food policies are needed at both national and international level to guide food system transformation towards sustainability. Rigorous indicator frameworks are essential in order to ...facilitate discussion of priorities, enable comparisons, assessment and progress monitoring, and ensure accountability. In this study, we develop a national framework for a sustainable food system, using Sweden as a case. Our framework, the Food System Sustainability House, advances the literature on sustainable food system frameworks in three distinct ways. Firstly, it is tailored to a specific national context (Sweden in our case); secondly, it distinguishes between impacts of domestic production arising within territorial boundaries and impacts related to Swedish consumption independent of country of origin; and thirdly, to facilitate policy priorities, it suggests how different dimensions of sustainability are interlinked at a conceptual level. From a scientific perspective, the Food System Sustainability House postulates the interlinkages between the societal objectives of the food system, the environmental foundations on which production takes place, and the economic system and governance which in the framework are suggested to function as enablers for an overall sustainable system. From a policy perspective, the framework provides a much-needed basis for assessing food system sustainability by suggesting indicators within a comprehensive set of sustainability themes at national level for monitoring distinct perspectives. It also provides the necessary basis for a discussion on how sustainability dimensions are interlinked.
•We develop a national food system indicator framework.•The framework distinguishes between consumption and production impacts.•The framework suggests how different dimensions of sustainability are interlinked.•The economic system and governance are introduced as enablers.•The framework provides a basis for policy discussions.
Sweden's environmental policy aims to solve domestic environmental problems without increasing environmental and health impacts overseas. Realizing this aim requires an indicator system with a ...consumption-based (or “footprint”) perspective that captures both local and global impacts and their development over time. In this paper, we present a set of novel footprint indicators to measure environmental pressures from Swedish food consumption. The indicators are calculated by combining data and statistics on agrochemicals and deforestation emissions with EXIOBASE3, a global Multi-Regional Input Output (MRIO) database with a unique and high level of product detail across countries. We estimate the use of pesticides and antimicrobial veterinary medicines associated with current Swedish food consumption and compare those footprint indicators with the EU-28. Carbon emissions from deforestation are calculated with a land balance model and included in the overall carbon footprint of food. We find that Sweden, with its large reliance of food imports, exert a significant agro-chemical and climate footprint overseas, mainly in the EU and Latin America. We point to a need for better data and statistics on the use of pesticides, veterinary medicines and agrochemicals residuals (especially in developing countries) as well as improved spatial data on agricultural activity to further reduce uncertainty in the environmental footprint of Swedish food consumption.
•We present footprints for agrochemicals and climate from Swedish food consumption.•Due to large food imports, a significant share of Sweden's impact occur overseas.•Emissions from tropical deforestation represent roughly 10% of carbon footprint.•More than three quarters of Sweden's pesticide footprint is embedded in imports.•Data gaps on use of agrochemicals are significant, especially in developing countries.
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