Sustainable Dietary Practices and Environmental Impact Assessment

Sustainable dietary practices encompass the selection and consumption of foods that meet nutritional requirements while minimising environmental harms across multiple domains, including greenhouse gas emissions, land and water use, biodiversity loss and pollution from novel entities. Assessment frameworks integrate life cycle analysis with a suite of environmental indicators—spanning climate forcing, biosphere integrity, blue and green water withdrawal, and nutrient leaching—to capture trade-offs and synergies inherent in shifts towards plant-based patterns. Such approaches reveal that reducing animal-source foods, curbing waste and adopting diversified, regionally adapted plant-rich diets can deliver substantial co-benefits for planetary health and human well-being. By coupling dietary scenarios with models of land-use change and ecosystem restoration, researchers demonstrate that moderate dietary adjustments could halve agriculture-related emissions, conserve freshwater and drive restoration of natural ecosystems, thereby contributing to global biodiversity targets and food-system resilience.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have quantified system-wide impacts of substituting conventional animal products with novel plant-based alternatives, using global land-use models to show that replacing half of major meat and dairy consumption by 2050 could arrest deforestation, reduce agricultural emissions by around 30 per cent and, if spared land is reforested, nearly double climate mitigation benefits. Complementary work employing a reduced-complexity climate model has partitioned food-system greenhouse gases by gas species, projecting that food consumption alone could add close to 1 °C of warming by century’s end, but that over 55 per cent of this rise may be averted through combined dietary shifts, improved farming practices and waste reduction. Detailed dietary surveys linked to life-cycle assessment datasets further reveal a clear gradient of environmental burdens across dietary groups: high meat-eaters exhibit the greatest footprints, while vegans and vegetarians can halve emissions, land and water impacts, underscoring the importance of actual consumption patterns and production methods in determining environmental outcomes.

Sustainable Dietary Practices and Environmental Impact Assessment publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in sustainable dietary practices and environmental impact assessment across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Greenhouse gas emissions: Quantities of gases such as CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O released into the atmosphere from production, processing and disposal of food, expressed in carbon dioxide equivalents to indicate climate forcing.

Life cycle assessment (LCA): A methodological framework for estimating the environmental impacts of a product or system across all stages, from raw material extraction through production, distribution, use and end-of-life.

Blue water consumption: Volume of surface and groundwater used in food production, irrigation or processing that is not returned to the source watershed.

Reduced-complexity climate model: A simplified computational tool that captures essential climate processes to estimate temperature responses from emissions scenarios with lower data and computing requirements.

Biosphere integrity: A measure of biodiversity and ecosystem health, reflecting the capacity of living systems to maintain functional processes and species richness under anthropogenic pressures.

References

1. Environmental assessment of diets: overview and guidance on indicator choice. The Lancet Planetary Health (2024).
2. Feeding climate and biodiversity goals with novel plant-based meat and milk alternatives. Nature Communications (2023).
3. Future warming from global food consumption. Nature Climate Change (2023).
4. Vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters in the UK show discrepant environmental impacts. Nature Food (2023).
5. The Impacts of Dietary Change on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Land Use, Water Use, and Health: A Systematic Review. PLOS ONE (2016).
6. Multiple health and environmental impacts of foods. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2019).