A better food system for people and the planet

Our food system is killing the planet and making us more unhealthy. Globally, food systems are responsible for roughly a third of greenhouse gas emissions and represent the biggest driver of species loss. Diet is now the main cause of non-communicable disease, with the food related costs of chronic disease to the UK currently greater than the entire annual healthcare spend. Urgent transformation is needed to enable healthy diets, make space for nature, reduce emissions and store carbon to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

What we eat as a society matters. Supporting small shifts towards plant rich diets can deliver big improvements to our health, helping reduce the cost of diet-related disease, and help meet our climate and nature targets. It also offers growth opportunities to the UK, through the expansion of the horticulture and alternative proteins industries, the latter of which could be worth up to £6.8 billion annually and create 25,000 jobs by 2035.

The public are open to changing their diets to be healthier and more sustainable but need more help doing so. The government’s announcement of a new food strategy provides an opportunity to drive this shift and capitalise on these economic opportunities. But there are challenges given the tight economic context and need to mitigate the impact on the most vulnerable in society.

This project seeks to educate and inform key stakeholders in government and beyond on policies that could support this shift to healthier and more sustainable diets.

In 2019, the UK environment secretary commissioned an independent review of the food system. The review, completed in 2021, combined data driven evidence with wide stakeholder engagement to diagnose serious problems caused by the food system, develop policy recommendations to tackle them and build a social and political mandate to act. 

This project explored how the UK’s National Food Strategy could be used to develop evidence-based pathways for farming and food systems in the UK and internationally to address the agricultural challenges of the climate crisis and to achieve a 1.5oC transition in line with the Paris Agreement.

It produced three reports, each drawing out different elements of learning from the National Food Strategy’s process, intended to help policy makers and influencers around the world to navigate the complex bio-physical, cultural and economic challenges posed by a food system transition.