Environmental footprints of improving dietary quality of Chinese rural residents: A modeling study

Abstract There is an urgent need to promote a healthy diet in rural areas because of the prevalent malnutrition. However, further investigation is needed to reconcile the debate on whether improving dietary quality for rural residents will increase the environmental footprints or not, especially in developing countries. Applying a life-cycle assessment method, here we investigate the changing trend of multiple environmental footprints of improved dietary quality scenarios for Chinese rural residents. We show that the average score for the China Healthy Diet Index (CHDI) for the rural diet in 2019 is 52.6 out of 100. This is lower quality than that of the Chinese urban diet in 2012. All the food-related environmental footprints and expenditure will decrease if CHDI improves to 70 and 80, further improvement of dietary quality will occasionally increase the environmental footprints. Food-related expenditure will generally increase, but the proportion in total disposable expenditure will decrease, along with improving dietary quality and affluence in the future. We show that the changes of environmental footprints depend on the level of dietary quality improvement, but additional strategies (e.g., reducing food loss and waste, and agricultural innovations) are still required to achieve a win-win outcome for health and the environment.