Conference Agenda

Current food systems are a major source of environmental challenges for governments and society, by generating more than one third of global greenhouse gas emissions – contributing to climate change – and by causing other environmental impacts, such as land use change, biodiversity loss, water scarcity and air pollution. All these environmental impacts negatively affect the welfare of society and represent a cost from an economic perspective. Making food systems more environmentally sustainable is therefore a clear and urgent priority.

So far, attention has been given to supply-side initiatives to promote environmentally friendly agricultural and production practices. However, the scale and speed of transformation needed to achieve climate and other environmental targets require that we also consider the potential contribution of demand-side interventions (including “soft policies” like information provision or nudging and “hard policies” like price-based interventions) to shift food consumption towards more sustainable patterns. In this sense, both policy-makers and businesses (e.g. supermarkets) can play a role in changing consumers’ behaviours (in line with the “Farm to Fork” strategy “of the European Green Deal).

The literature in this field has been growing recently. However, previous studies have typically limited their focus to specific food products or single measures and policies, thereby taking a piecemeal approach to the analysis of the problem (and related solutions).

The aim of this session is to bring together the latest evidence on the effectiveness and economic impacts of a range of food demand interventions aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of diets, and to explore the trade-offs and opportunities associated with different private and public policy scenarios.

Price-based interventions are found to be typically more effective than information or education in achieving the set targets. However, these latter policies are generally zero-cost measures, while hard policies like taxes are often associated with (regressive) welfare costs for consumers. Combining different measures (like subsidies/price discounts and taxes, or information and nudging) can help overcoming some of these challenges, but uncertainty remains regarding the advantages and disadvantages. Additionally, it’s important to also look at the unintended (spillover) effects of food demand interventions – both positive and negative – on consumers’ health and the wider environment. Taking a broad perspective in the analysis of the problem is therefore important to draw more complete policy recommendations and to better inform both private sector and public sector decision-making.

This session’s proposed contributions will rely on a wealth of methodological approaches (ranging from field to survey experiments and simulations) to explore the effect on food consumption choices of single and combined interventions in different geographical areas (spanning across several EU countries and beyond).

Attendees of this session will learn about the environmental impacts of alternative food consumption choices, the mechanisms that can be considered to address them (and the related unintended effects), the effectiveness of specific interventions and policy mixes, and the economic costs and benefits of alternative policy set-ups.