No abstract

March 2021Datasets on food product quantities and anonymised interview responses used in this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. For legal confidentiality reasons, financial data from the College cannot be made publicly available.

Organisations are increasingly committing to ‘nature-positive’ targets, in line with proposed international goals. However, there are few worked examples showing how to feasibly achieve these targets. Here, we set out a novel approach to achieving nature-positive targets with respect to the embodied biodiversity impacts of an organisation’s food consumption. We quantify these impacts using a comprehensive database of life-cycle environmental impacts from food and provide exploratory strategies to meet defined targets, structured according to the Mitigation and Conservation Hierarchy. Through considering the varying needs and values across the organisation’s internal community, we identify a range of feasible, targeted approaches towards mitigating impacts, which balance top-down and bottom-up actions to different degrees. However, we also find that delivering ambitious nature-positive targets within current constraints will be highly challenging, particularly when considering how to mitigate cumulative impacts. Our results evidence the need for transformative systemic change if nature-positive targets are to be achievable at the organisational scale.