SSRN (2026)
Preprint
With land use change and overexploitation from agriculture and fisheries acknowledged as the biggest driver of global biodiversity loss, it is increasingly important for individuals and organisations to reduce the environmental impacts from their food consumption. However, existing decision-support toolkits and other approaches (including consultancy) that can help individuals and organisations reduce their impacts are limited in several ways: they often only focus on greenhouse gas emissions and do not consider other environmental impacts, provide information on commodities rather than finished food products, or require substantial time to use. Here we co-designed a semi-automated analytical framework – FoodMetric – with users. This framework includes calculating baseline food-related environmental impacts, setting environmental targets, and identifying impact-mitigation strategies that could meet these targets. We applied FoodMetric to two case studies – an individual’s supermarket loyalty card data and an organisation’s food procurement data – to show how this approach could bridge the gap between sustainability targets and day-to-day food purchasing decisions. These case studies revealed that the most effective impact mitigation strategies involve major reductions in the highest-impact foods rather than broadscale change across their food portfolio. Case studies also highlighted potential trade-offs between greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity. This research provides an approach that could help bridge existing ambition-to-action gaps, with the potential to be fully automated and applied at scale within daily decision-making.
