Adding the environmental cost to the price of food in European diets could cut food-related impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, by almost 6%.
These findings come from a recent Nature Food study that looked at how to incorporate the environmental externalities of food into European grocery store products.
Looking at 27 European countries, the researchers gathered data on household food consumption in each one, as well as the dietary footprint of those consumption patterns. Taking this data, they then simulated what would happen if they took one of two approaches. The first was to remove the tax reductions—effectively subsidies—that are widely applied to European meat products, so that they reflect their true price. The second was to apply a greenhouse gas emissions price of about €52 per ton of CO2 equivalent on all food products, which would cause changes in the price of foods based on their carbon-intensity.
Because both of these methods increase the price of higher-impact foods like meat, the predicted effect was that this would reduce the consumption of those products, therefore lowering their environmental footprint overall.
When the researchers tested out their theory, they found that removing the meat subsidy caused the average price of meat products to surge by 10.6%. That then reduced meat demand by between 8% and 11.3% on average, across the 27 EU countries. This meat-focused method alone drove down dietary impacts—which included greenhouse gas emissions, water, land and fertilizer use—by between 3.5% and 5.7%.
But then the study found that even more could be achieved with the second approach. Placing an emissions tax of €52 per ton of CO2 on all foods not only drove emissions reductions similar to the first method, but also brought greater co-benefits for the environment. This approach reduced nitrogen use, phosphorus use, water consumption, and land use by more than the subsidy-removal method. Its greater effectiveness is due to the fact that the emissions tax targets a wider range of foods and therefore their impacts than the meat subsidy removal, the researchers explain.
Increased food pricing can push consumers towards replacement products, some of which will be cheaper. But not always. In fact as a final step the researchers ran a cost analysis and revealed that the two food pricing methods would actually add a €109 expense to households’ annual diets for the subsidy removal, and €150 for the emissions tax.
However, they also showed that if the cost savings generated by less fertilizer, land and water use were transformed into social compensation for residents across the EU, that annual expense would shrink to between €12 and €26.
The next steps would be to get these study results in front of policymakers. On the one hand, removing meat subsidies is a quickly-enforceable measure that already has some political interest in the EU, the researchers say. On the other, a broader emissions tax on all foods is a more complex move that will take longer to bring in. But the larger number of foods targeted by that measure allows more flexibility and reach that could achieve greater change over time, they argue.
Ultimately, like others before it, this study reveals that there are the powerful levers within the food system to drive positive environmental change.
Plinke et. al. “Environmental impacts from European food consumption can be reduced with carbon pricing or a value-added tax reform.” Nature Food. 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene. AI-generated
