Abstract
Reducing food loss and waste (FLW) could lessen the environmental impacts of food systems and improve food security. However, rebound effects—whereby efficiency improvements cause price decreases and consumption increases—may offset some avoided FLW. Here we model rebounds in food consumption under a scenario of costless FLW reduction. We project that consumption rebound could offset 53–71% of avoided FLW. Such rebounds would imply similar percentage reductions in environmental benefits (carbon emissions, land use, water use) and improvements in food security benefits (increased calorie availability), highlighting a tension between these two objectives. Evidence from energy systems suggests that indirect effects not included in our analysis could further increase rebounds. However, costs of reducing FLW would reduce rebounds. Rebound effects are therefore important to consider in efforts aimed at reducing FLW.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 585-595 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Nature Food |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| Early online date | 20 Jul 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 20 Jul 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Acknowledgements We thank Peter Newton, Sebastian Dueñas-Ocampo, Rayna Benzeev, Lee Frankel-Goldwater, Waverly Eichhorst, Ryan Langendorf, and Hilary Brumberg for their feedback on earlier drafts of this document; and Ryan Langendorf for helpful feedback and discussion on the economic analysis. M.H. and M.G.B. acknowledge funding from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) (Award number: 2020-38420-30727), and the University of Colorado Boulder Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) (start-up grant to M.G.B.). S.J.D. was supported by the US National Science Foundation and US Department of Agriculture (INFEWS grant EAR 1639318) and by the ClimateWorks Foundation (grant 22-2100). .Data Availability Statement
We used public data from FAOSTAT (https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/), the United Nations Environment Program Food Waste Index Report database (https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-report-2021) and the 2019 State of Food and Agriculture Report (https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en?details=ca6030en). We also used data from relevant literature as cited in our study54,55. All data used in this study are included as supplementary information and are also publicly available at https://github.com/mhegwood/foodwaste. Source data are provided with this paper.Code availability
Data analysis was conducted in MATLAB (version 9.11.0.1809720 (R2021b) Update 1) and Mathematica (version 11.3). The code used in this study is included as supplementary information and is also publicly available at https://github.com/mhegwood/foodwaste.
Access to Document
- Hegwood_etal_NF_Rebound_Effects_Could_AAM
This is the accepted manuscript of this article, absent final proofing and formatting, which is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) as per the terms of the University of Aberdeen Rights Retention Strategy. The final published version is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/