Browsing by Subject "sustainable food policy"

Climate change and biodiversity loss are some of the most serious challenges the humanity is facing today. Current food systems are a major contributor to both global crises with massive negative impacts on climate and biodiversity, and thus, sustainable food system transition is inevitable in slowing down the further progress of climate change and biodiversity loss. One way to tackle the unsustainabilities of the food systems is through policy interventions, which can guide both food production and consumption to a more climate- and biodiversity-friendly direction. The aim of this thesis was to examine the popularity of different policy instruments in terms of reducing food’s climate and biodiversity impact among Finnish young adults. Moreover, this thesis aspired to find out which areas of food production and consumption Finnish young adults think policy interventions should target. Young adults were chosen as a target group, because they are in an important position in sustainability transitions. This research is based on survey data and the method applied was content analysis with characteristics from both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The data was analyzed in Atlas.ti program by using inductive and deductive content analysis methods. The results indicate that the most popular policy instruments for reducing food’s impact on climate and biodiversity among Finnish young adults were market-based, including taxes as the most popular and subsidies as the second most popular individual measure. This is in contrast to previous literature, where taxation and other market-based policies have been reported to be the least favored policies. Furthermore, information-based policies, of which especially raising awareness, regulatory instruments, of which particularly price regulation, as well as public procurement policies like a vegetarian day in public food services were among the most popular policy instruments. Although not directly examining acceptability, these results offer a glimpse on policy acceptability, which is found to be crucial in successful policy implementation. Further research is needed to study the acceptability of these policies comprehensively. Moreover, policy target areas related to food consumption rather than production were more popular among the respondents. Target areas such as favoring domestic food, reducing or ending animal product consumption and production, transitioning to vegetarian diets, making better (e.g. climate-friendly) choices easier, and converting meat into a luxury product were the most suggested. These results could be scaled up in future studies and then utilized in creating sustainable policies for food consumption and production, and that way reduce the climate and biodiversity impact they cause.