The LiveWell diet’s other footprints

May 19th 2014

Erik Gerritsen

Erik Gerritsen

Since the launch of LiveWell for LIFE, the team has been repeatedly asked: why do the LiveWell Plates only consider carbon footprint? There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, because carbon footprint life-cycle assessment was – at the start of the project – better developed than for example, that of water or land footprint. Secondly, because climate change was at the time the highest political priority, including binding European targets for emissions reduction. In Europe, pressure on the food chain to reduce its carbon emissions was growing, while the options to achieve these through production were shrinking. Prioritising carbon footprint made sense, and as the recent IPCC report has shown the urgency for the global food chain to reduce its carbon footprint has only increased.

However, since the popularisation of Rockstrom’s planetary boundaries study, policy-makers’ attention to other environmental threats – like biodiversity loss and reactive nitrogen – has broadened the scope of the agenda. Food and agriculture play a critical role in driving biodiversity loss and nitrogen pollution, as was acknowledged in the EU’s Roadmap to a Resource-Efficient Europe. Since the Roadmap was published in September 2011, a fierce debate has been on-going to find the right indicators for resource efficiency. Several groups, for example Friends of the Earth, ask for the inclusion of footprint indicators notably carbon, water, material and land. As the latest UNEP International Resource Panel report showed, land use through expansion of cropland is a key driver of biodiversity loss.

But, do these different footprint indicators come to same conclusions on diets? As the LiveWell project has shown, healthy eating has a great potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the food chain. A large study done for the European Commission in 2011 showed that if all Europeans would adopt healthy diets, greenhouse gas emissions from food consumption would reduce with over 30%. More recently, work by the Commission’s Joint Research Centre showed a 23% reduction in our water footprint if all Europeans would adopt such diets. And, a German study published last month showed we can achieve 17% land use savings through a healthy diet. (Note: A lacto-ovo vegetarian diet would reduce these footprints even more: 41, 38 and 39% respectively!).

In short, growing insight has shown new environmental priorities for changing diets as well as other indicators to measure them. The good news is that the different footprint indicators converge, and it would make a lot of sense to use these in policy-making.

PS. At the LiveWell Value Your Food conference, Nestlé showed their analysis of the French LiveWell Plate – including various footprints. Watch the Nestle presentation here!

Erik Gerritsen

LiveWell for LIFE policy officer – WWF EPO

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