Sustainable food policies for the EU27: results from the EUPOPP project

Abstract

Developing policies to promote sustainable consumption (SC) is urgently needed, but a demanding task, especially in the need area of ‘food’. To develop effective and coherent instruments and respective policies, the links between instruments influencing consumption patterns, cultural or lifestyle differences must be considered, and how changes in consumption patterns translate into impacts in terms of ecological, social and economic sustainability. The EU FP7-funded project EUPOPP focussed on the need areas of housing and food to identify best-practice policies to promote more sustainable lifestyle. The assessment of such policies must account for consumer action being interlinked with activities of other market players, and path-creating effects of technologies and systems of consumption and provision. The paper presents results from a multidisciplinary tool for the assessment of consumption policies which links policy analysis and material flow analysis. These impacts are derived from a baseline scenario against which sustainability effects of instruments for sustainable food in the EU-27 are quantified, especially ‘bundles’ of information campaigns, labels, incentives and regulatory instruments. Impacts of these different instrument bundles in the need areas of ‘food’ and ‘housing’ were explored at the EU level, while addressing the international dimension (e.g. trade effects) in parallel. The EUPOPP project developed a full life-cycle database for EU food consumption in 2010, and projections for 2020–2030. The material flow analysis for the sustainable consumption scenarios gives results for cost, GHG and air emissions, land use, and employment effect.