This study examines strategies to reduce the land footprint of food consumption in Estonia through socially acceptable moderate dietary changes while maintaining nutritional adequacy. The food consumption patterns in Estonia were categorized into 14 groups. Three diets were evaluated: a reference diet, the nationally recommended diet (NRD) by the National Institute of Health Development, and an optimized diet that minimized the land footprint while staying close to the reference diet. The results indicate that adopting the optimized diet led to reduced consumption of animal products, particularly milk, and increased consumption of cereals, starches, vegetables, fruits, and pulses, resulting in a 15% decrease in the diet-related land footprint. The study also estimated internal and external land footprints using %import. This research presents a flexible modeling framework that can be adapted for similar research endeavors.

Authors: Bashir Bashiri, Aleksei Kaleda, Olga Gavrilova, Raivo Vilu

Published in: World Congress on Sustainable Technologies (WCST-2023)

• Date of Conference: 13-15 November 2023
• DOI: 10.20533/WCST.2023.0002
• ISBN: 978-1-913572-64-8
• Conference Location: St Anne’s College, Oxford University, UK