The Impacts of Dietary Change on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Land Use, Water Use, and Health: A Systematic Review

By L. Aleksandrowicz, Rosemary Green, E. Joy, Pete Smith, A. Haines. PLoS ONE, 2016

910 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Food production is a major driver of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water and land use, and dietary risk factors are contributors to non-communicable diseases. Shifts in dietary patterns can therefore potentially provide benefits for both the environment and health. However, there is uncertainty about the magnitude of these impacts, and the dietary changes necessary to achieve them. We systematically review the evidence on changes in GHG emissions, land use, and water use, from shifting current dietary intakes to environmentally sustainable dietary patterns. We find 14 common sustainable dietary patterns across reviewed studies, with reductions as high as 70–80% of GHG emissions and land use, and 50% of water use (with medians of about 20–30% for these indicators across all studies) possible by adopting sustainable dietary patterns. Reductions in environmental footprints were generally proportional to the magnitude of animal-based food restriction. Dietary shifts also yielded modest benefits in all-cause mortality risk. Our review reveals that environmental and health benefits are possible by shifting current Western diets to a variety of more sustainable dietary patterns.

Subfields: Ecology, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c916d25840d00538ad46c3ade964a8df8cff6350

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In Ecology

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

Arjen Y. Hoekstra

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J. Fanzo

Citations in the corpus

Healthy and Sustainable Diets and Food Systems: the Key to Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2? (2019, background): “…the environmental impacts of dietary patterns (Joyce et al. 2014, Auestad and Fulgoni 2015, Hallström et al. 2015, Nelson et al. 2016), including three that explicitly explored health outcomes alongside environmental outcomes (Aleksandrowicz et al. 2016, Payne et al. 2016, Perignon et al. 2016).”
Agri-Food Markets towards Sustainable Patterns (2020, background): “sustainable diets can slow down resource depletion and climate change, and reduce the prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) [244].”
Bioeconomy Strategies: Contexts, Visions, Guiding Implementation Principles and Resulting Debates (2017, background): “The discussion focuses on two points: reduction of food losses [140,141] and changed diets with reduced consumption of animal products [142,143].”
Which Diet Has the Least Environmental Impact on Our Planet? A Systematic Review of Vegan, Vegetarian and Omnivorous Diets (2019, background): “A sustainable diet is one with production that has little environmental impact, is protective and respectful of biodiversity and of ecosystems, and is nutritionally adequate, safe, healthy, culturally acceptable and economically affordable [6,7].”
The Food Systems in the Era of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic Crisis (2020, background): “The current trends in alternative protein sources include the dietary shift from beef to poultry and pork (to reduce red meat consumption) [64], new plant-based sources (e.”
Rewiring food systems to enhance human health and biosphere stewardship (2017, background): “Two recent systematic reviews [15, 16] show that greenhouse gas emissions, land conversion, and water use can be reduced by up to 50%–80% by adopting plant-based diets that also are beneficial for health outcomes.”
Country-specific dietary shifts to mitigate climate and water crises (2019, background): “Previous studies documenting ecological impacts of dietary scenarios have called for greater geographic specificity (Aleksandrowicz et al., 2016; Jones et al., 2016), as most have examined only one or a few—almost exclusively industrialized—”