Dr Pauline Scheelbeek (LSHTM) & Dr Steven van Winden (RVC)

Over the past decade, the global discourse on sustainable diets has expanded significantly. This has offered many new insights into dietary changes that are required to reduce carbon footprints, water usage, land degradation, biodiversity loss, and eutrophication related to diets. Despite this progress, critical evidence gaps persist in our understanding of how to accelerate such behaviour change toward sustainable diets, how to effectively influence producer choices for sustainable food production, and how to elucidate the intricate linkages between sustainable diets and production systems.  

This proposed PhD project seeks to address these evidence gaps, focusing on the relationship between sustainable diets and production systems, using the United Kingdom as a case study. The overarching goal is to contribute to a fuller understanding of how changes in dietary choices are linked to production practices (and vice versa), how these can collaboratively lead to a reduction in food system emissions and – in turn – improve environmental sustainability, public health, and nutritional well-being. 

The PhD-student will use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including surveys, interviews, case studies, and modelling approaches. The study will draw on existing collaborations between the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) focussing on modelling the potential effect on food system emissions achieved through dietary changes, improved production systems, and a synergistic combination of both.   

The PhD student will build on this work and answer the following research questions:    

1. How does current food supply map onto required supply for population-wide adoption of sustainable and healthy diets? 

2. What are realistic UK-based scenarios of production changes (e.g., moving from livestock to crop farming) that would reduce the supply gap of foods that align with healthy and sustainable diets at population level? 

3. What policy options would be most suited to facilitate such change?  

4. What direct and indirect health effects and emission reductions would be expected from sustainable and healthy diets based on foods from sustainable production systems?  

This PhD project would help unravel the links between sustainable diets and sustainable production systems, which both need to undergo transformations to successfully reduce food system emissions. The work has the potential to be influential in guiding policies and is extremely timely in the current political climate, that has pathways to net zero as well as improvement of populations health high on their priority lists. 

Closing date for applications is:  Sunday 17th March 2024  

Further details about the project may be obtained from: 

Pauline Scheelbeek – Pauline.Scheelbeek@lshtm.ac.uk 

Steven van Winden – svwinden@rvc.ac.uk 

Further information about PhDs at LSHTM/RVC is available from: 

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/courses/research-degrees/mphil-phd

https://www.rvc.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/phd

How to Apply:

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/study/fees-and-funding/funding-scholarships/research-degree-funding

Key References

Willett, W., Rockström, J., Loken, B., Springmann, M., Lang, T., Vermeulen, S., Garnett, T., Tilman, D., DeClerck, F., Wood, A., Jonell, M., 2019. Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. The lancet. Feb 2; 393(10170): 447-92. 

Hoek, A.C., Malekpour, S., Raven, R., Court, E. and Byrne, E., 2021. Towards environmentally sustainable food systems: decision-making factors in sustainable food production and consumption. Sustainable Production and Consumption, 26, pp.610-626. 

Jarmul, S., Dangour, A.D., Green, R., Liew, Z., Haines, A. and Scheelbeek, P.F., 2020. Climate change mitigation through dietary change: a systematic review of empirical and modelling studies on the environmental footprints and health effects of ‘sustainable diets’. Environmental research letters: ERL [Web site], 15, p.123014