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Quantifying the environmental impact of dietary choices Developing a consumer-level indicator linking food choices to the planetary boundaries

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Academic year: 2022

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Project proposal Bright Minds Assistantships February 2022

Quantifying the environmental impact of dietary choices

Developing a consumer-level indicator linking food choices to the planetary boundaries

Department: Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development Research group: Environmental Sciences

Supervisors: dr. Hugo J. de Boer & Floris van den Berg Email address: h.j.deboer@uu.nl & F.vandenBerg2@uu.nl

Project description

The worldwide food system has enormous impacts on the environment, society and public health

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. Part of this impact is directly related to the daily choices individual consumers make in terms of the food that is bought, consumed and wasted. Yet, it is currently difficult for individual consumers to quantify the environmental and societal impact of their individual dietary choices. For example, it is impossible to quickly oversee to which extend a specific diet contributes to land use change. This research project aims to further develop, test and validate consumer-level indicators that allow individual consumers to quantify the impact of their diet on the environment. The main goal is to develop an easy-to-access indicator for consumers to learn how their diet has impact on the environment and so to raise awareness and, hopefully, to guide consumers towards more sustainable or at least less unsustainable, food choices.

The research team has successfully developed such a consumer-level indicator to quantify the land-use requirements related to individual diets

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and can be accessed online at https://repl.it/@MarijeHo99/QBHALF. The student working in the Bright Minds Assistantship is expected to extend this approach and relate dietary impacts to the planetary boundaries framework proposed by Rockström et al. (2009). Hereto, the impacts of dietary choices on key indicators of the different planetary boundaries need to be first quantified and related to information available to the average consumer. The validity of the projected impacts then needs to be tested and validated. As the proposed project involves, for the most part, model development and desk research we expect to experience little disturbance due to potential measures related to Covid-19.

Job requirements

The student is expected to have background knowledge on the environmental impact of the global food system, is confident in quantitative data analysis and is familiar with a scrip-based coding language such as Python, R or Matlab.

References

1. Herdoiza, N., Worrell, E. & van den Berg, F. The Expanding Moral Circle as a Framework Towards Food Sustainability. (2021) doi:10.3197/096327121X16245253346639.

2. Hoff, M. & de Boer, H. J. A Question-Based Method to Calculate the Human Appropriation of Land for Food (HALF) Index. Sustainability 12, 10597 (2020).

3. Rockström, J. et al. Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity.

Ecol. Soc. 14, (2009).

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