In September 2013, a report was presented by three Swedish authorities that all deal with the cross-cutting issue of healthy food and climate impact. Together, the National Food Authority (NFA), the Board of Agriculture and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) presented an accessible report with examples of diets, conflicting environmental targets and an investigation into how low we can go in terms of climate impact before 2050. The report is part of Sweden’s national 2050 roadmap, and has many similarities to LiveWell for LIFE with its focus on climate impact and healthy food.

The report concludes that Sweden can produce the same amounts of food that’s produces today with a 30 percent reduction of climate impact. This depends on introducing more efficient production systems, biogas production from manure, peat soils conversion to forest land and climate-smart fertilizers.

The climate-smart weekly menu – presented in the report – can result in greenhouse gas emissions of 0.9 to 1.3 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year; this implies that greenhouse gas emissions can be halved by focusing on consumption of food alone. The difference between the climate-smart menu and the menu based on the Dietary Guidelines is that the former contains even less meat, less dairy and more fish, potatoes, root crops, vegetables, fruits and berries.

A combination of production and consumption measures has the potential to lower climate impact to somewhere around 0.5 to 0.8 tons of carbon dioxide per person and year. This shows that it is possible in theory, and the report discusses pathways and concepts to achieve this in practice. Representatives from the authors of the report are active members of LiveWell’s Network of European Food Stakeholders, and continued discussions take place in order to disseminate messages and influence policy in Swedish.

The report is available in Swedish.