Reducing emissions from food – citizens speak up

Andy Yuille and Alice Garvey.

Keir Starmer has set a new, challenging 81% emissions reduction target for 2035, based on advice from the Climate Change Committee. But he also says that he’s not going to be “telling people how to live their lives”.

This approach resonates with the outcomes from the first substantive block of meetings of the EDRC’s Citizens’ Panel, which explored the food sector. Panel members wanted to see substantial emissions reductions from the sector, but felt strongly that change should not be imposed. However, they did want to see strong central government leadership and support for change.

The panel was set up to test the social mandate for substantial reductions in energy demand and emissions through social change, and explore the conditions which would need to underpin changes to make them socially acceptable.

It brings together citizen deliberation with technical modelling, with the aim of generating modelling that is better informed by social intelligence. You can read more about the panel’s purpose and how it operates here.

In this first block, the panel addressed the question “What could a healthier and more sustainable national diet look like, what may prevent or support us reaching that, and how we can ensure that changes work for everyone?” Expert speakers from the academic, private and third sectors provided members with evidence and answered their questions. The panel then developed their own, bottom-up visions in response to the calling question. They mapped these onto different levels of ambition for various aspects of food system change, derived from the Positive Low Energy Futures model. They identified barriers to achieving those visions and the kind of policy measures they would back to overcome them, culminating in the development of a new panel-led scenario.

The panel strongly supported eating less meat and dairy, both on health and sustainability grounds. But there was equally strong support for the need to retain freedom of choice, and recognition that a wide variety of individual diets would persist, for reasons ranging from personal taste to medical and religious requirements. They were concerned that an approach that was perceived as imposing changes to something as personal as what we eat could lead to a backlash.

“We can’t impose a national diet on people. Some people will kick back against it.”

“We want food security. I want to be healthy. And yes, I want to be able to make poor food decisions as well.”

The panel-led scenario required strong, consistent and sustained leadership, but members expressed a lack of confidence in government’s ability to achieve this, partly driven by concern about short-term electoral cycles and food becoming a ‘political football’.

“The thing is with policy as well, something can happen with one government that suddenly is destroyed by the next government and then you’re in this flip-floppy state of policy not having an impact because it’s not in place long enough.”

The panel favoured an approach relying on ‘carrots rather than sticks’, and one which would not disadvantage marginalised or vulnerable people or have harmful economic effects, especially on farmers and small businesses.

“People respond to it better don’t they, they don’t like to be told”

“It’s all about equality and access at the end of the day”

The central elements of the scenario were education, information and public engagement, on everything from the link between food and emissions, the connection between healthy diets and sustainable diets, and the skills, know-how and capabilities required to plan, buy, cook, and eat more sustainable, healthy diets. Extensive, sustained engagement through a wide range of national and local channels, platforms, and trusted messengers, and with a particular focus on schools, was considered necessary to shift norms, attitudes, and practices in relation to what and how we eat food.

“Education changes the culture, doesn’t it?”

“It’s more about changing people’s attitudes towards meat, but that comes with education”

The scenario also required:

• Public sector catering (schools, councils, government, prisons, hospitals, etc) to be majority plant-based
• A traffic-light food labelling system for high / medium / low emissions foods
• More of the food we eat to be produced in the UK
• Food imports to meet UK standards for sustainability and animal welfare
• Reformed farm subsidies to encourage more UK-grown fruit, veg, grains, and legumes, less but better meat and dairy farming, and more land for biodiversity and carbon storage
• Firm policy intervention to eliminate unnecessary food waste and food packaging

Panel members initially identified a high level of ambition for change across many areas of the food system. However, they also identified barriers (including cost, the power of large commercial actors, time scarcity, and choice and quality of non-meat protein sources) that would not be addressed by the measures in their preferred scenario. This was translated into assumptions about dietary change to generate a modelled scenario that indicated a lower extent of change. This scenario combined the level of change that panel members had indicated was desirable with a pragmatic judgement on credibility, given the gaps between identified barriers and support measures.

The new modelled scenario would make a substantial contribution compared to our current trajectory, with a 36% reduction in emissions from the sector by 2050, although this is considerably lower than the higher-ambition scenarios suggested as technically possible in the original Positive Low Energy Futures model. However, due to the relatively slow action of the proposed measures, which revolve around gradual cultural change, the cumulative emissions reductions in this scenario would only be 13%. 45% of the panel agreed that this reflected a suitable level of ambition, while 45% wanted to go further.

You can read some reflections on the challenges of combining modelling and deliberation here.

On top of this bottom-up, panel-led scenario, members were also asked to discuss two additional approaches, which could drive dietary change further and faster. After their deliberations, 90% of members supported stronger regulation of food companies, including restrictions on advertising and requirements to promote healthier, low-emission foods. 65% of panel members supported a price cap on sustainable, healthy foods. However, this support was highly conditional, and framed by concern about unintended consequences and practical difficulties in implementation.

More information about the outcomes of the food block and its implications for policy can be found in our policy briefing.

The panel’s feedback on these additional measures will be used to inform further new food sector modelling. Future blocks of panel meetings will guide new modelling on other sectors, including products and materials, housing, and transport. These will then be brought together to generate whole-economy panel-led scenarios, enabling the panel to understand and discuss interactions between sectors and to further develop their views and conclusions.