Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Global food consumption is transitioning in a way that not only imposes pressure on the ecological environment but also adds to health risks. While scholars have been discussing whether shifting to healthy diets also realize a co-benefit in reducing environmental impacts, the spatial distribution of such change and the spillover effects due to the globalization of the food supply chain is under-explored. In this study, we evaluate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and land appropriation of shifting to dietary patterns for global countries. We compare the diet of each country in 2011 with the dietary recommendation from Global Burden of Disease Study to identify the change of food consumption in eradicating dietary health risks. Next, we adopt the environmentally-extended input-output analysis to quantify the GHG emissions and land appropriation resulting from the change of food consumption. We further track backward the international trade network to map the distribution of territorial environmental impacts due to the change of agricultural production, with a separation of domestic and exported impacts. We find that shifting to healthy diets lead to a reduction of GHG emission from 4874.1 Mt CO₂e to 4294.0 Mt CO₂e (by 11.9%, and 1.9% of the all-sector emissions) and land appropriation of 2.62 billion m² to 2.12 billion m² (by 19.1%, and 8.1% of the all-sector appropriation) per year, mainly driven by cutting down the consumption of meat, cereal, oil, and sugar. The change is heterogeneous across countries with all but a few countries in South Asia and Africa reducing both their consumption-based and production-based environmental impacts. The major change happens domestically, while the change of exported environmental impacts plays a role in Brazil, United States, China, and Australia. Our findings reveal the importance of local heterogeneity in evaluations on the environmental impact caused by promoting healthy diets, and provide policy implications in mediating the global food-health-environment nexus through domestic food consumption, international trade network, and consumer behavior change.