HORIZON EU | CHOICE: Mainstream Mitigation Pathways for a Climate-Conscious Change in the Food System

Project summary:

The Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are an invaluable instrument for modeling climate stabilization pathways and for supporting the policy makers in taking better-informed decisions. Nevertheless, the mitigation options traditionally focused on in IAMs are the supply-side measures, whereas less attention used to be paid to demand-side and food system representation, due to the inherent complexity and actor heterogeneity. CHOICE aspires to mainstream IAMs, embedding them into the lifestyle choices and decision-making process of consumers, producers and actors of the Food, Agriculture and Land Use sectors. This ambition is leveraged by a more realistic representation of behaviour change and actor heterogeneity aspects in IAMs, and supported by an approach that bridges social science and marketing tools, with the aim of accelerating climate action. This approach will be supported by the large-scale adoption of CHOICE digital immersive tools, data storytelling and gamification, whose design is underpinned by notions of emotional appeals and social incentives. Using these digital enablers, CHOICE will orchestrate large-scale engagement and ‘green marketing’ campaigns, that have a wide geographical and societal dispersity. Thus, starting from a bottom-up analysis of individual consumers and actors of the food supply chain, and understanding their behavior and their potential for change, CHOICE will use this information in order to consistently feed into a new generation of IAM models, that will correctly reflect the underlying heterogeneity, accounting for multiple representative consumers and actors. The IAM-generated impacts from highly influential 1.5oC-compatible mitigation actions shall highlight, besides emissions, the co-benefits of their changes in behaviour or practice in terms of health, biodiversity and food security aspects, in familiar scales.

Project website

Work package 2: Modelling and promoting behavior change around food towards IPCC goals: Lead beneficiary ATHENA RC

Objectives:

• Provide the framework for mapping the socio-economic profiles of actors along the food consumption and food supply chain related to the CHOICE pilot demonstrations, to ensure wide geographic and societal dispersity;
• Model the Supply and Demand chain’s behavioral change options;
• Determine the pair of interventions and conversion goals matching each mitigation measure and local specificities for CHOICE pilots; liaise with WP6 (Task 6.1) in order to match requirements regarding pilot goals and participation levels at each campaign iteration (modify campaign duration and population to achieve suitable results);
• Design and implement randomized control experiments to evaluate and optimize messages, designs, and interventions;