 Right, so hello and welcome everyone to the second installment of the CSR research webinar series For those of you who've joining us for the first time so last time we were We were listening to Dr. Gabriel Kello on Immobility in eastern Africa and this time we have Dr. Emma Garnett with us who will be talking us through understanding The environment impacts of food and how to mitigate them So Emma is one of CSR's Prince of Wales fellows and The program and so I'm Dr. Jana Hoon. I was social scientist by training But I'm the program manager for research, which means I work quite closely with Emma on Delivering the research portfolio that we do have here in CSL But the program that Emma is part of is one of the flagship programs of CSL trying to Use research as a vehicle to address fundamental questions for the private sector to enable action on sustainability So the work that we do is particularly focused on stakeholder engagement, but also an impact so it is co-designed all the way through and it actually looks at Who is this work for? Who is the audience and what can people do about it? So in the case of Emma before joining CSL She was actually was completing a PhD at the Department of Zoology Here with he also in Cambridge Looking again at the impact of food and diet and how we can actually reduce the carbon impact from that So looking at the attendee attendee is very excited to see like a wide range of people on this We have particular particular of colleagues from the investment and banking sector on here So the question might come up. Why should finance be looking at food? so what is the relationship there and to Put it is a little bit into perspective and context and I think as Emma is going to mention Food is everywhere, but also food is a highly politicized area It is a highly emotional, but also it affects everyone. There's also part of a wider system So thinking about for example consumer focused systems food is one of them So what is the role in revamping systems that are that are centered around consumers? A huge chunk is consumer behavior and how consumer behavior can also drive demand This is applicable not just within the food system, but I think we can also learn lessons from For example banking for high street banking. What happens if people walk into a bank? How do you make that decision? What drives people to actually purchase something and even all the way down to systems like transport? But I think that is only one element of to the work that Emma is doing a second chunk of it is Going into the lead per content level is around food and the food system So what is the future market here? What is it going to look like and which criteria are we going to apply to what we will call a sustainable food system or even like a sustainable diet? And again, it is sort of the criteria that we're going to be talking about is kind of what makes a food company sustainable, for example Is the fact that a company is just not serving meat enough to justify an investment or is it actually do we have to take into consideration their packaging Their approach to sustainable agriculture to production land use and also what is their relationship to biodiversity? So there's quite a lot of like who are we going to so who are going to be the producers of food in the future? But then also on the consumer spectrum and the intermediary We have also some colleagues from supermarkets on the line meaning who's going to decide what goes onto a shelf So within a fast-paced debate like sustainable diets Emma's work is really key and core to helping us understand what are the environmental impacts of food And hope and how can we shake the system going forward? But without much further ado, I'm going to hand over hand over Emma who's going to talk us through it And at the end of at the end of Emma's presentation, we're going to Take some questions So if you have any questions feel free to just pop them in the chat and we'll be addressing them After Emma's presentation Emma over to you Hello everyone and thank you very much Gianna for that fantastic summary of This really interesting topic area. Thank you everyone for joining this afternoon. My name is dr. Emma Garnett and My research focus during my phd and during my fellowship is essentially around Understanding the environmental impacts of food and how we can mitigate them Whoa apologies. There we go So I think the first thing that's kind of worth talking about is that you know food is glorious food is wonderful and I think when we're thinking about climate and ecological emergencies, it can be quite easy to kind of feel despondent and perhaps sort of pessimistic but Here to kind of encourage everyone that healthy and sustainable diets can be delicious and indulgent and really varied and wonderful And these are just you know, some of the recipes from some of my favorite food writers are Jack Monroe, Mira Soda and Kate Taylor So this is the good news Unfortunately, the bad news is that producing food has transformed our planet arguably more than any other human activity So food production is responsible for about a quarter 26 percent of greenhouse gas emissions About 38 percent of earth's ice-free land And is responsible for about 70 percent of freshwater withdrawals So, you know huge huge environmental impacts and farming is also unfortunately a leading cause of biodiversity loss Uh for kind of a little bit of um interaction. I think Becker can now kind of launch a poll um And so there's three different questions and we're asking all of you on the on the call Which has higher greenhouse gas emissions. So that's a carbon footprint Uh per kilo So chicken or cheese chocolate or parma oil strawberries or coffee Becker, let me know when that's um Approximately finished. I'll give people about a minute And Becker, am I able to see the results? Okay Oh, and I'm thank you seeing some results. So, uh, 23, um 77 percent of people said cheese had the higher um carbon footprint and the second one Fledges everywhere and I can not see perhaps as much as you can Right, and I think we're now onto the second one. So higher greenhouse gas footprint chocolate or palm one And 60 percent of people said palm oil And now onto the third question Oh dear Which has the higher greenhouse gas footprint strawberries or coffee So the results from that third one We will hopefully be finding out Very soon 65 percent of people said coffee had the highest carbon footprint and just be launching that And right. So the majority of the audience got two out of three correct. Um, which I'm very impressed with so chicken or cheese I think 77 of you Um correctly identified that cheese has higher greenhouse gas emissions chocolate or palm oil. So this is the one that um The only one the majority of people were incorrect on in fact chocolate has higher greenhouse gas footprint and palm oil Um and strawberries or coffee most people correctly identified. Yes. It is coffee And so I thought some of those were quite counterintuitive, but you are all clearly um great experts on sustainable food And great job. So let's have a look at these in a little bit more detail Uh, so at the top there you can see um highest carbon footprint. So this is per kilo if you get per thousand calories Um, those comparisons stay the same, but the actual order of all six of them are a little bit different Uh, so cheese and the highest there are quite a lot higher uh greenhouse gas footprint But cuter than poultry meat quite near the bottom Whereas um, yeah, uh chocolate or palm oil In fact, um, and you can see in dark green there These are the emissions the amount of carbon going out into the atmosphere from land use And even though because we're producing so much palm oil in total palm oil is driving more deforestation than chocolate If you're looking at a global level But on a per kilo level if you're buying an a kilo of chocolate or a kilo of palm oil On average that chocolate has driven a lot more greenhouse gas emissions from land use change, which uh, I think not many people are quite so familiar with And uh coffee or strawberries even though and berries and grapes are some of the highest emissions for fruit and vegetables Coffee is much much higher than those which again, most people identify correctly and great job And though, of course, there's a lot other Environmental impacts to consider besides carbon footprint. It does correlate with a variety of others I think some of the really interesting things that you can see here is the land use change and on farm emissions really dominate products and carbon footprint and you can see that you know processing in dark blue transport in red packaging in gray Uh are generally quite a much smaller component. Uh, the one of the biggest ones for packaging. It turns out it's coffee And I really recommend that our world in data food footprint explorer You can go and compare different food stuffs by you know per kilo per thousand calories and see the different stages In the supply chain I think one of the things that this really draws out Um is that you know in the uk a recent study from just last year found many of our less nutritious foods and drink account for nearly a quarter of diet related greenhouse gas emissions so things like cakes But also drinks such as tea coffee and alcohol contribute about 15 percent of diet's greenhouse gas emissions in the uk And so this is this is part one thing to consider that some things which used to be you know sort of luxuries that are now becoming kind of more daily Almost essentials perhaps The impact that they have on greenhouse gas emissions and also land use and deforestation and therefore impacts on biodiversity I think one of the second things that giano related to as well When we're thinking about sustainable diets is reducing meat and dairy consumption and why is this important? So unfortunately, you know livestock farming within food production is a leading cause of habitat loss climate change and biodiversity loss and there are Two main principal reasons for this. Um firstly that it's inefficient to feed for example soy To livestock and then to people you might remember your biomass pyramids if you did gcsc biology As I did and so losing kind of energy materials as you go up the food chain and then the second reason cows and sheep So the rumen and animals even then they can eat grass which we can't eat and that can be really useful in many parts of the world They breathe out methane they release methane as part of their digestive process Which is a very very powerful greenhouse gas and also takes up a large amount of land That could otherwise be sequestering more carbon or have more biodiversity And then I think another fact which Is important to consider you know food miles are only about six percent of the food to carbon footprint And so when we're thinking about food what you eat matters more than where it comes from And I really want to emphasize transport particularly transport of people is an absolutely key sector for climate change It has huge emissions and the fact you know planes and cars And we need to be moving to you know more public transport and fewer trips where possible That is really really key But actually within the food system on farm emissions dominate food is generally transported It is not very often transported by air which is good news It's by ship and by freight by train by lorry which has Lowish emissions of per per kilo of food Now let's have a look at the carbon footprint of some protein rich food So that previous slide had a whole lot different food stuffs And one of the things I think becomes very apparent looking at this You know foods from cows sheep, you know and also prawns Very high emissions per 100 grams of protein and then in kind of intermediate We've got kind of pigs poultry and fish And then at the bottom sort of tofu beans and nuts And so I think two quite important issues is that the there is a you know, there's a wide variety So if you look particularly at the top like beef and beef but also crustaceans the lowest emitting foods Uh in those little gray circles are much lower than kind of 90th percentile So this is you know, the 10th best down to the 90th best or the 10th worst so you can see that spread there Um, so there is that variation that is important, you know, not all cows are alike not all Eggs are alike, but even despite that spread you can see that generally even the lowest emitting animal source foods tend to have higher emissions Than the worst tofu nuts ground nuts pulses. So yes, there's that variation and there's still, you know, quite a distinct separation between protein rich plants and protein rich animals And we see a similar but slightly different person and we're looking at the land footprint of protein rich foods And so land and carbon it's a very intertwined not only through Deforestation and releasing carbon, but if we're thinking about nature positive businesses The bigger the land footprint of your diet the less land you have to restore nature or become nature positive So if you're able to you know feed people in nutritious and interesting diet on smaller areas of land That frees up land, you know for nature for biofuels first of other uses So thinking about land footprints, you know, how much land does a food take up? How much land does a fuel or you know different materials construction materials fabrics Is a really really important question. How much land does how much land does that take? Really really key And we can see at the top again cows and sheep intermediate pigs poultry nuts And actually fish have moved down to the bottom and surprisingly fish don't take up quite so much land But we're seeing you know tofu and peas down there as well thinking about fish Unfortunately, you know fish is a really really important source of protein and micronutrients for many people particularly in low-income countries But often in the global north We're rooting for quite a lot of fish and this has led to overfishing of fish stocks and the so within 2017 About 34 of stocks were overfished and 60 percent were fully fished So maximally fished and only six percent right at that bottom. They were underfished So we're running out of marine foods as well And then another when we think about endangered species often we think about you know pandas or rhinos But actually there's you know endangered species that many of us in the uk still eat So the atlantic cod Is listed by the iuc and red list as vulnerable to extinction. That's the same as the african lion And the european eel, which our local town of ele is named for and people sort of still Eat is critically endangered and that's the same as a black rhino. So thinking about where we're sourcing fish from Is also really really key And and then surprising and perhaps a kind of less controversial one in a food waste Approximately a third of food worldwide is wasted about 1.3 gigatons of edible food And according to some estimates of food wastage where a country it will be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter behind china and the united states Also interestingly if you if cows were a country, they also come into third place there And i'm moving on to some more good news Having gone through a variety of bad news is that healthy foods and sustainable diets do overlap to a broad extent So processed and red meat high levels of consumption of that have links with bowel cancer and heart disease And the department of health recommends in a less than 70 grams per day of processed and red meat But a number of us in the uk eat quite a lot more than that And to put that in perspective to 70 grams is just one rasher of bacon and one sausage So in this graphic here, you can see as we go along from left to right That's going from more healthy to less healthy and as we go from bottom to top That's in better for the environment to worse so bottom left We can see vegetables fruits whole grains and nuts top right and processed red meat processed red meat I think it is really important to point out some of the exceptions here. So, you know fish Moderately high environmental impact on average, but it's beneficial for health Sugar sugar and sweetened beverages low environmental impact not so good for health So there are some exceptions, but broadly healthy instant with diets overlap And taking I suppose one thing away from this Having a look at the planetary health diet if you haven't come across that. It's a really really interesting report and recommendations Is it right? What does a global sustainable diet look like for 10 billion people? Which is what we're projected to reach And in short unsurprisingly, you know, it's a lot It's a lot of nuts and beans and vegetables and not so much meat and dairy So per week, that's about half a kilo of beans and other legumes quite a lot of nuts About one and a half sausages worth of red meat two small portions of chicken Two small portions of fish and about the equivalent of about seven glasses of milk And then going from per week, which I think is easier to visualize in some ways Scaling that up to per year, which is what the trade data is supported in Let's say that's about 15 and a half kilos of meat per person per year And let's round that up to about 19 20 kilos to account for food waste And so how much meat do we eat and In the uk as you can see here this map of kind of orange and red a lot of the global north Including the uk much much higher than this 20 kilo recommended amount of meat and globally from 1961 to 2017 Meat per person has almost doubled from about 23 kilos to 43 And our the human population has more than doubled from 3 billion to about 8 billion So livestock production has quadrupled in that time, which unfortunately is not very sustainable Right. So how could we change diets? How could we make diets healthier kind of more sustainable? How do we mitigate these environmental impacts? I think it's Considering low versus high agency interventions I think can be really really is really really key and there's this great figure from adams out Looking at increasing folate intake with two different approaches So if at the top there you can provide an information leaflet to try and get people to take folic acid supplements But look at all those different stages That have to happen for that to work The in people have to obtain the information leaflet. They have to read it. They have to understand it They then have to buy folic acid supplements and then they have to remember to take them So that requires quite a lot of mental bandwidth in each stage You're likely to be the losing people who drop out along those chain of actions that are needed Compare this to a low agency intervention, which you know doesn't require much mental bandwidth You can think of agency is amount of resources effort bandwidth And here we've got folic acid added to wheat flour at source Which is what we have in the UK And to benefit from that intervention. All you have to do is continue to purchase wheat flour products and eat them Which is much easier. So I think when we're thinking about right, how can we shift society To be more sustainable? How can we make it as easy as possible? And in a recent paper we published when we're thinking about how can we how could we change diets thinking about these low agency interventions I think you can broadly categorize things into the physical environment. So thinking about altering Stools cafeterias and restaurants what we might call a micro physical environment But also the macro physical environment villages towns and cities And essentially it boils down to decreasing in the opportunities to consume unsustainable food and increasing opportunities to consume more sustainable food And similarly with the economic environment and changing prices of different things. And yes, this can be through subsidies and taxes You know other material incentives such as nectar points And it doesn't always have to be at a government level, you know Different businesses might have options on how they price different things. I realize of course there's constraints on that And essentially this boils down to sustainable food options are the most affordable and less sustainable food options are the least affordable So thinking about price and taxes and subsidies in a little bit more detail So from a number of different surveys, we know that price is a really important influence on citizen food purchases And there have been a number of different country schools first of a meat tax or a carbon tax, but there are none currently in operation I think what's really important to bear in mind is that subsidies dominate uk farming profits You can see in this graphic from the financial times This is for all farming systems, you know a number of the profits come from these direct payments Poultry is the least and lowland and upland grazing livestock are the most reliant on subsidies And so we don't currently have a you know a free market situation that our food system is very much shaped by existing policies It's not a kind of a natural or inevitable consequence. It's very socially manufactured thinking about making sustainable options more available Kind of easiest ones to do and this is some research from my phd And we conducted a study in different college cafeterias And looked at these ones naturally varied the number of total options and the vegetarian option served So we're using vegetarian and vegan as a proxy for more sustainable, which the data does bear out generally And so for example monday lunchtime, you can see if you've got three options and two vegetarian and ones meat We call that, you know, 67% vegetarian availability If we're looking over at wednesday lunchtime, we've got four total options Two of which are vegetarian and so that's a 50% vegetarian availability And so we wanted to know, okay, right what happens as you've got more vegetarian and vegan options and fewer meat options Does that affect sales? Does that change citizen behavior? And what we found was that yes, it did and that doubling vegetarian availability So this is the axis along the bottom there going from 0 to 70 Doubling that from 25% to 50% So one in four options, two in four options led to a 70% increase in vegetarian sales and the sales That's on the y-axis going from bottom to top there And what we were particularly Interested to find and to looking at this graph on the far right hand side Is that even meat lovers? So that's the people in the kind of dark dark red who were able to identify from previous sales data Through to the most vegetarian diners, that's at the top in dark blue So dividing people into four quarters those four different lines All four of them all four groups were more likely to pick a vegetarian option as more became available So even meat lovers pick vegetarian options when there are plenty to choose from Of course, Cambridge University students aren't representative of the world or the UK as a whole But this was quite a surprising finding and we found that overall sales remained constant So, you know build it and they will come cook something tasty and people will eat it Be one of the lessons from this I'm thinking about this in a kind of real-world example So Cambridge University introduced a sustainable food policy This was in 2016 from Nick and Paula White And there were 14 different cafeterias across the university homeless doesn't include the university colleges where a lot of students eat And they had four main pillars for their sustainable food policy, which I've covered in this talk So improving vegetarian and vegan choices and actively promoting them So chefs learning how to cook a variety of different tasty options And promotions within the cafeterias They took beef and lamb off the menu entirely And they were only serving sustainably sourced fish and they really aimed at cutting food waste And the sustainability policy had a really remarkable impact And I think being able to kind of measure this and sort of show what this business had achieved was really key for its impact and influence And a colleague of mine compared March and May 2015 with March to May 2018 Procurement so before the policy and after the policy And they found that the carbon and land footprint per kilo of food had decreased by about a third So that's a huge huge change in a really successful policy And they also saw about a two percent increase in gross profits And we were very excited to briefly be on the front page of a bpc news University of Cambridge removing meat to cut carbon emissions And you know nick and paula you know absolute trailblazers And if you have a little google for earth optimism reducing an organization's footprint I think hearing from nick is I well, I find them just very inspiring if you can listen to him I think that kind of operations perspective is so so so valuable And i'm just going to end with thinking about an environment of footprint labels and foods We're talking about you know one of the pieces of work i'm doing in this fellowship in a bit more detail And currently carrying out a review thinking right Because there's a lot of hype and interest in this at the moment if we put a sustainability label as an example there on the right on every Food item in supermarkets. Would that label would that be enough to shift kind of customer behavior? Have nutrition labels been enough to shift customer behavior? Might they influence retailer behavior? What retailers are choosing to promote? End of supply and could environmental labels increase support for other policies to bring about more sustainable diets So those are some of the questions and i'll be thinking and writing about And I will stop there. So there's plenty of time for questions. And yes, thank you very much everyone for coming And yeah, I look forward to answering any questions in coming