London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

The ways in which environmental changes over the next 20-30 years could affect diets in the UK and worldwide will be investigated in a new project led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. The two-year study is led by Dr Alan Dangour, and is the fourth project from School researchers to be selected for funding through the Wellcome Trust Sustaining Health initiative.*

The study will investigate how environmental "stresses", including climate change, rainfall and loss of important plant pollinators such as insects, will affect food and nutrition security - how much food there will be, what type, where and at what price.

A collaboration between researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Harvard University, Imperial College and University of Reading, the project is the first to address the combined effect of multiple environmental stresses while taking into account other influential factors such as global food markets, population growth and urbanisation.

Dr Alan Dangour, Reader in Food and Nutrition for Global Health at the School and Principal Investigator for the project, said: "There is potential for environmental stresses to have a tremendous impact on food and nutrition security in the UK, and worldwide. As we saw in 2008 when rising food prices resulted in riots around the globe, food insecurity also has major implications for economic and political stability. Yet at the moment there is a real lack of evidence for what those impacts will be.

"This research will give us a much clearer understanding of how environmental stresses are intricately linked with the availability of nutritious food globally to enable governments to support the health needs of their population. By alerting policy makers to the people in society who are most vulnerable, we hope that this study will provide the necessary grounding to prevent, or prepare for, what's on the horizon."

The first stage of the study will consider how multiple stresses might change the availability of different types of food for a variety of people and regions, combining a range of possible scenarios into a single model. The resulting model will then be used to predict the real term impacts of environmental change on diet, health and the cost of food in three example countries: UK, Mexico and Ethiopia, selected due to their very different agricultural systems.

The Wellcome Sustaining Health initiative is a global funding scheme to support research into the impact of a changing world on the future of human health. The scheme has previously awarded funding to three other projects at the School:

Palm Oil: Sustainability, Health and Economics

The multi-faceted impact of palm oil production in Thailand is being investigated in a project led by Richard Smith, Professor of Health System Economics at the School.

Palm oil consumption has escalated hugely in recent years, reflecting trends of westernisation in global diets. A massive increase in oil production has had unknown economic, health and environmental consequences and Prof Smith's project is investigating this for the first time, in a collaboration between the School and SOAS. In the future, this research will advise policy in Thailand and other palm oil-growing areas to promote a sustainable industry. 

Health and environmental implications of low-carbon, climate-change resilient diets in India

Dr Dangour is leading a project alongside Dr Rosemary Green, to investigate how modern diets in India vary across the country, and how this impacts people's health and the environment.

In collaboration with the University of Aberdeen and the Public Health Foundation of India, this research will then advise government bodies how agricultural production and diets in India could be adapted to minimise environmental impact and promote healthy nutrition, as the population continues to expand.

Sustainable Healthy Urban Environments (SHUE)

Paul Wilkinson, Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the School, is leading a collaborative project to explore how certain characteristics of cities can affect how sustainable they are.

The SHUE project is recording information from 100 cities to show which features can enhance or limit their sustainability. The researchers hope that this will advise current city design and construction for long-term environmental and health benefits.

* From September 2015 the initiative has been renamed as 'Our Planet, Our Health'

Related links

• Future diets and health: how will environmental changes affect food availability, food consumption and health?