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CHOICE: Mitigate climate impact in the food chain

CHOICE: Mitigate climate impact in the food chain

MITIGATION PATHWAYS FOR A CLIMATE-CONSCIOUS CHANGE IN THE FOOD SYSTEM

Uniting Disciplines for Climate Stabilisation

IAMs and Behavioural Models

Sustainable and Climate-Conscious campaigns & transformative activities

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issues a crucial warning, emphasizing the urgency of achieving zero emissions by 2050 to mitigate severe climatic consequences. This ambitious goal necessitates comprehensive efforts, encompassing both supply-side and demand-side mitigation actions, along with substantial behavioral and lifestyle changes. Industries, particularly major contributors like Food and Agriculture, are urged to undergo transformative measures.

In this context, CHOICE aims to incorporate Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) into the decision-making processes of consumers, producers, and other stakeholders in the Food, Agriculture, and Land Use sectors. This involves the development of more realistic representations of behaviour change and actor heterogeneity in a new generation of IAMs, utilizing a combined social science and marketing approach to drive climate action.

IAM-generated simulations from impactful mitigation actions related to consumption, production, or lifestyle in these sectors will not only cover emissions and temperature rise but also emphasize co-benefits in health, biodiversity, and food security.

Thus, CHOICE seeks to provide insights into how small and medium-scale actions can contribute to large-scale climate policy objectives, employing socially innovative approaches for effective actions and policies. In this respect, extensive engagement campaigns will be developed, accompanied using digital tools, data storytelling, gamification, emotional appeals, and social incentives on a large scale.

All this will be done with a team involving entities from 8 countries and different continents, with diverse and complementary profiles, with which they will work on CHOICE solutions through 5 pilot campaigns in:

Greece: Promote sustainable grocery shopping choices in an online retail store.

Colombia: Motivate local women coffee producers to adopt sustainable production practices, reduce communities and ecosystem vulnerabilities.

Spain: Adopt sustainable farming practices for olives and livestock sector.

South Africa: Adopt healthier, sustainable diets, reduce of food waste.

Austria: Adopt more healthy and sustainable food consumption lifestyle choices.

ObjeCtivEs

To promote climate awareness and sustainable practices through IAMs integration into food-related applications and services, utilizing data storytelling, immersive tech, gamification, and social incentives.
To improve precision and policy relevance of widely recognized IAMs by enhancing representation of actor diversity and behavioral aspects for realistic societal transition mapping.
To demonstrate how local-level actions for food-related demand-side measures can be scaled up globally, considering diverse socio-economic profiles and ensuring equity effects.
To enhance IAMs acceptance among non-experts-groups of stakeholders and decision makers by engaging them in visualizing results and building scenarios, fostering an open science approach and supporting capacity building in research teams.
To examine and measure trade-offs resulting from proposed actions, considering biodiversity, health and, food security, towards the achievement of UN Sustainable Development Goals.