Sustainable Nutrition when Economic Affordability Shifts

ongoing

Sustainable Nutrition (SN) is a part of the Sustainable Development Goals and EU policy aims characterized by societal, environmental, health and economic aspects. The recent years' changing food prices due to the socio-economic crisis in Europe have raised new challenges of economic affordability in addition to the dietary environmental pressure and the spread of Non-Communicable Diseases. While diet cost has been an organic part of SN, the possibilities to integrate social subgroup-specific food price elasticates into the diet optimization model haven’t been exploited. SUNEAS is an international, interdisciplinary and intersectoral project; it aims to enrich the existing framework of diet optimization models by integrating micro-simulation and diet optimizations models. As for methods, by statistical and econometric data processing, social subgroup specific household consumption data will be merged with SN metrics into a database. Economic micro-simulation models will be developed to calculate subgroup specific behavioral price elasticity responses (“elasticities”). Social subgroups will be considered by nationality, gender and income level concentrating on the economically vulnerable segments. As a key between micro-simulation and diet optimization models, social subgroup-specific price elasticities will be integrated as variables into diet optimization models also accounting for environmental and health aspects. Then, the effect of price variation on subgroups specific dietary quality and environmental pressure will be investigated for providing evidence food and health policy interventions. Finally, the adaptation of the model into individual-level diet optimization will be explored during a non-academic placement, in order to test its practical applicability. SUNEAS responds to a recent crisis in European food system while prioritize the diverse sustainability aspects by creating a model that integrates these important issues into a novel research methodology.