CHAPTER EIGHT

Nutrition and Climate Change

Shifting to Sustainable Healthy Diets

Marie T. Ruel and Jessica Fanzo

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Shifting to sustainable healthy diets to protect human and planetary health requires consumer education, fiscal measures, and healthier food environments

KEY FINDINGS & RECOMMENDATIONS

Ensuring that everyone has access to — and consumes — sustainable healthy diets is one of the most significant challenges for today’s food systems.
Climate change and environmental and natural resource constraints are putting enormous stress on food systems. In turn, the way we produce, process, and move food, and the global changes in diets toward greater (often excessive) consumption of animal-source foods and ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are contributing to climate change.
The effects of climate change on food systems, diets, nutrition, and health disproportionately impact marginalized populations in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Shifting to sustainable healthy diets that protect both human and planetary health will present several challenges:
- Adoption of sustainable healthy diets will require major changes in consumption patterns globally, with changes varying by region and country.
- Adaptation of a reference diet, if developed, will need to accommodate different countries, contexts, and population groups.

- Affordability of these diets will need to be ensured; current examples of potentially sustainable healthy diets are unaffordable for a large proportion of the population in LMICs, as are many nutritious foods.
Achieving these goals will require the development and implementation of policy packages in LMICs that include multipronged, coherent, and mutually reinforcing actions. Priority policy packages should include consumer education approaches along with fiscal measures and food environment policies. Examples of priority actions could include:
Education approaches to inform, educate, nudge, and influence dietary choices (public awareness campaigns, nutrition counseling, mass media, social media, and so on); promotion of breastfeeding; and development and updating of food-based dietary guidelines.
Fiscal measures to discourage consumption of unhealthy UPFs, and/or incentives to retailers to subsidize and boost consumption of nutritious foods.
Food environment policies, including food labeling and certification, and regulation of marketing and promotion of unhealthy foods to children to enhance demand for healthy diets.

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