Low-GHG culturally acceptable diets to reduce individual carbon footprint by 20%

For mitigating climate change and respect targets, humanity must decrease emissions as soon as possible: the later is the action, the harsher will be the trajectory of the mitigating pathway. Structural actions need time to become operational. Therefore, individual actions shall also enter into play, focusing on what has a high impact and whose change is at hand: food-related emissions build up 30% of total anthropogenic impacts and eating is an everyday activity. In this study, regional culturally acceptable low-carbon diets are proposed for China, Europe and US. They are developed considering the requirements of energy and nutrients supply, they respect regionality of food consumption – e.g., they include only foods that are diffused in the area – and they are aimed to limit the individual effort to be adopted – e.g., they include all the food categories, meat included. They are low-carbon since food items are selected on the basis of their lifecycle carbon footprint (CF). Eventually, the regionality constraints are relaxed to develop a World's low-carbon diet. For every area, we found a diet that halves the food-related CF. Instead, our World's low-carbon diet reduces the average food-related CF by 75%. Therefore, the overall individual CF would be reduced by a fifth in case of its adoption.