Environmental impacts of diet changes in the EU

This EU-commissioned report, published in August 2009 by Arnold Tukker et al, is a scientific contribution to the EU's Integrated Product Policy framework, which seeks to minimise the environmental degradation caused throughout the life cycle of products.

The report builds on the initial EIPRO report which looked at the environmental impact of consumption (of all kinds, e.g. transport, housing etc.) in the EU and concluded that dietary habits contribute to 27% of the EU's environmental impacts.

There was then a second report, IMPRO, which looked at the technical mitigation options for food (and cars etc.) but which also said that changes in dietary behaviour could be useful. And so this is the report that seeks to assess the impact that dietary shift might have.

The report first presents an overview of the environmental impact cause by current dietary habits in EU27. It identifies five main types of diets (through cluster analysis) which, in descending order of animal product-intensiveness are: the Nordic diet (with France included in this cluster); Western Europe; South-Western Europe; Eastern Europe; South Eastern Europe.

Animal products are defined as meat and dairy foods. It then develops three alternative diets the basis of health recommendations from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), World Health Organisation (WHO) and other organisations, and calculates the changes in environmental impacts achievable through a shift towards these diets.

It doesn't model any significant changes in dairy intakes (except for a slight reduction in butter and a shift to lower fat versions) and assumes compensating increases in chicken and fish consumption. It finds that with scenario three, the EU's environmental impacts can be reduced to 25% through reduced consumption of red meat (ie. food's environmental impacts are reduced by 8%).

It then looks at the environmental effects of household budget re-distribution and price and substitution effects in the agricultural sector (i.e. if we don't buy meat, what else will we buy and what will the impact of that be? If we rear less meat what will be the impact on the agricultural sector in Europe?). The report finds that if these second order impacts are included the contribution reduces to just 26%.

The report concludes that even though the environmental effects are small, such changes will be good for our health and are worth doing anyway. Finally the report has a shortish chapter on consumer behaviour and analyses policy measures which stimulate the uptake of healthy diets by consumers.

It says that because food and nutrition are strongly rooted in traditions and habits, policy measures aiming at stimulating a change towards healthy diets need to include a combination of different instruments, ranging from consumer awareness raising to public procurement activities.