THRIVING Food Futures

THRIVING stands for Transdisciplinary Health Research to Identify Viable Interventions for Net zero Goals. Along with a consortium of researchers from Cambridge, Strathclyde, Warwick, Queen Mary University London and City St George’s University London, we work in the fields of public health, environmental sustainability, policy research, deliberative methods and software development.

Research Overview:

Our dietary choices, farming methods and the way we transport food have major implications for the environment. Improvements to our food systems help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but reducing meat consumption in high income countries is vital to meet Net Zero targets.

This change in diet for the sake of the environment may bring about co-benefits for health. Poor diets greatly increase the risk of disease in the UK, and the impacts of poor diets are felt disproportionately in less affluent groups.

Outline of research:

Establishing a transdisciplinary network of experts, THRIVE Food Futures will work with community panels establish a prioritised set of policies based on the views of policymakers and citizens, develop tools and metrics to design a model that provides a standardised definition of unhealthy, unsustainable foods, and conduct reviews of the policy landscape to identify policy priorities and global best practice.

The findings from the community panels and policy reviews will determine policies to be used in field trials and examine how proposed policies would fit into the current policy landscape.

Finally, field trials based on this work will take place in real-life food purchasing settings with input from the public through community citizens’ panels.

Objective

Our focus is on policies that will help people choose more sustainable and more healthy food and diets, primarily through changing how food is marketed and sold.

Summary of planned activities:

Holding citizens’ juries and policymaker interviews to identify viable sustainable healthy diet policies;
Building policy tools and research platforms based on the latest data on environmental footprint of foods;
Developing systems maps to highlight intended and unintended consequences of policy action;
Evaluating interventions in real-life food settings.