Applying the Concept of Sustainable Diets in Kenya and Vietnam

There is an urgent imperative to reshape human diets to simultaneously safeguard human health, mitigate climate change, and sustainably use the planet’s natural resources – a concept encapsulated in the idea of “sustainable diets”. Despite the number of national governments, scholars and international institutions that have been promoting sustainable diets, a major barrier is defining clear interventions points and approaches that will provide a net-positive systemic influence across sectors. Our project considers how existing data and insights into the policy process can inform interventions that could effectively shift multiple axes of food systems towards more sustainable diets. Led by UM collaborators Andrew Jones (SPH), Lesli Hoey, Marty Heller (SEAS) and partners at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), our international team is working through an iterative consultation process with national and sub-national decision-makers and experts in each country, identifying critical decision making needs, data gaps, and insights into the policy process at diverse scales with the aim of informing evidence-based, systems-level decision making on sustainable diets. This project is made possible with major funding from UM’s Graham Sustainability Institute. See our project’s first policy briefs for Kenya and Vietnam, and our first publication.

Faculty

Lesli Hoey