Promoting a shift away from meat consumption towards an increased share of plant-based alternatives is a promising strategy for addressing environmental challenges while also improving population health. Many consumers already express a strong interest in adopting more sustainable and healthy diets, however, empirical evidence suggests that there is only a weak link between these intentions and actual dietary changes. To unpack this intention-behavior gap this study explores three research questions 1) What factors explain intentions to reduce meat consumption among meat eaters? 2) How much meat do individuals with reduction intentions consume, compared to those without such intentions? and 3) Among participants with reduction intentions — what factors drive their continued meat consumption? To answer these questions, we developed a survey and recruited a nationally representative sample of Swedish consumers (n = 998). A backwards stepwise regression, including 14 theoretically informed variables, revealed that attitudes— towards meat (β = −0.32) and plant-based proteins (β = 0.35) both — were the strongest predictors of intentions to reduce meat consumption. Individual factors like environmental self-identity (β = 0.13) and gender (β = 0.08) played smaller but meaningful roles as did practical considerations such as the perceived convenience of cooking meat compared to plant-based foods (β = 0.09). Furthermore, although the result showed a significant difference in self-reported meat consumption between individuals with high stated intentions to reduce meat intake and those with low or no intention, the size of the difference was small only (d = 0.15), bordering negligible, reaffirming the suspected intention-behavior gap. Among those with intentions to lower their meat consumption, only two key variables emerged as driving continued meat eating — meat purchasing habits (β = 0.33) and a positive attitude towards mea t(β = 0.17). These results underscore the challenges of translating intentions into action and highlight how different variables are important for a) shaping intentions and b) driving these into actions. While intentions are a needed prerequisite for voluntary behavior change, they sometimes prove insufficient on their own, especially when the aim is to change behaviors heavily governed by habits. Practical implications suggest that focusing on breaking habits and fostering positive attitudes towards plant-based alternatives are key in bridging the gap between intentions and actual diet changes.

In the face of growing environmental pressures, understanding how governance can promote more sustainable dietary behaviours is increasingly critical. However, a synthesis of available intervention strategies for behavioural change is currently missing. This umbrella review synthesizes findings from 29 reviews published between 2018–2024, assessing effectiveness of governance interventions aimed at reducing consumer-level food waste and shifting diets toward more environmentally sustainable patterns, particularly reducing meat consumption and increasing the uptake of more sustainably produced foods. Using a dual-method approach, combining narrative synthesis and effect direction analysis, we evaluated interventions through the lens of behavioural change theory. A majority of interventions demonstrated positive effects, especially those targeting food waste, which tend to face fewer cultural and motivational barriers than dietary changes such as meat reduction. Information-based interventions were most commonly studied. While they effectively raise awareness and influence attitudes, there is broad consensus that they are insufficient in isolation to drive substantial behaviour change. Interventions that restructure the decision-making context, such as setting vegetarian meals as default, removing trays in canteens, or reducing portion sizes, consistently showed positive effects. Written and verbal cues were effective in reducing food waste, while results were more mixed for meat reduction. Feedback and goal-setting strategies appear promising, but have been evaluated mostly through stated, rather than observed, behaviours. Fewer studies examined incentivising, coercive, or training-based interventions, though these approaches may offer higher impact if implemented appropriately. Overall, the findings highlight the need to combine intervention types to target the full range of behavioural determinants: capability, opportunity, and motivation. We also highlight the need for more rigorous, long-term, and context-sensitive research. Finally, we offer recommendations for policy makers and researchers, emphasizing that consumer-focused efforts must be integrated into a broader, cross-sectoral policy strategy, spanning health, agriculture, environment, and education, to enable substantial change in food consumption behaviours.

Background The global food system is inflicting substantial environmental harm, necessitating a shift towards more environmentally sustainable food consumption practices. Policy interventions, for example, information campaigns, taxes and subsidies and changes in the choice context are essential to stimulate sustainable change, but their effectiveness in achieving environmental goals remains inadequately understood. Existing literature lacks a comprehensive synthesis of evidence on the role of public policies in promoting sustainable food consumption. Our systematic map addressed this gap by collecting and categorising research evidence on public policy interventions aimed at establishing environmentally sustainable food consumption patterns, in order to answer the primary research question: What evidence exists on the effects of public policy interventions for achieving environmentally sustainable food consumption?

Methods Searches for relevant records (in English) were performed in WoS, Scopus, ASSIA, ProQuest Dissertation and Theses, EconLit, Google Scholar and in bibliographies of relevant reviews. A grey literature search was also performed on 28 specialist websites (searches were made in the original language of the webpages and publications in English, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian were eligible) and Google Scholar (search in English). Screening was performed at title/abstract and full-text levels, with machine learning-aided priority screening at title/abstract level. Eligibility criteria encompassed settings, interventions (public policies on sustainable food consumption), target groups and outcomes. No critical appraisal of study validity was conducted. Data coding covered bibliographic details, study characteristics, intervention types and outcomes. Evidence was categorised into intervention types and subcategories. Visual representation utilised bar plots, diagrams, heatmaps and an evidence atlas. This produced a comprehensive overview of effects of public policy interventions on sustainable food consumption patterns.

Review findings The evidence base included 227 articles (267 interventions), with 92% of studies in high-income countries and only 4% in low-income countries. Quantitative studies dominated (83%), followed by mixed methods (16%) and qualitative studies (1%). Most interventions were information-based and 50% of reviewed studies looked at labels. Information campaigns/education interventions constituted 10% of the sample, and menu design changes and restriction/editing of choice context 8% each. Market-based interventions represented 13% of total interventions, of which two-thirds were taxes. Administrative interventions were rare (< 1%). Proxies for environmental impact (85%) were more frequent outcome measures than direct impacts (15%). Animal-source food consumption was commonly used (19%) for effects of interventions on, for example, greenhouse gas emissions. Most studies used stated preferences (61%) to evaluate interventions.

Conclusions The literature assessing policies for sustainable food consumption is dominated by studies on non-intrusive policy instruments; labels, information campaigns, menu design changes and editing choice contexts. There is a strong need for research on sustainable food policies to leave the lab and enter the real world, which will require support and cooperation of public and private sector stakeholders. Impact evaluations of large-scale interventions require scaling-up of available research funding and stronger multidisciplinary research, including collaborations with industry and other societal actors. Future research in this field should also go beyond the European and North American context, to obtain evidence on how to counteract increasing environmental pressures from food consumption worldwide.

This study explores social-psychological barriers that may affect resilience in the context of sustainability. These barriers can be understood as unobserved processes that reduce the capacity of a social-ecological system to recover after a perturbation or transformation. Analyzing social-psychological processes enables us to distinguish passive and active processes, at the individual and collective levels. Our work suggests that interacting social and psychological processes should be considered as dynamically evolving determinants of resilience, especially when perturbations can change the psychology of individuals, and thus the underlying dynamics of social-ecological systems. Hence, considering social-psychological barriers and the conditions under which they emerge may provide decision makers with useful insights for coping with ineluctable uncertainties that reduce systems' transformative capacity and thus their general resilience.

A frequent justification in the literature for using stated preference methods (SP) is that they are the only methods that can capture the so-called total economic value (TEV) of environmental changes to society. Based on follow-up interviews with SP survey respondents, this paper addresses the implications of that argument by shedding light on the construction of TEV, through respondents' perspective. It illuminates the deficiencies of willingness to pay (WTP) as a measure of value presented as three aggregated themes considering respondents' unintentionality, their retraction once they understood that their WTP could be decisive in cost-benefit analysis and the inherent incompleteness of WTP. We discuss why the TEV discourse persists, how it conceals rather than reveals broader notions of value and in what ways our results support the development of alternative approaches that truly endorse plurality in environmental valuation and decision-making.

This paper provides a review of the economics of tipping points in natural resources and climate change economics, examining recent advances in theoretical modeling and controlled experiments. We begin with the non-convexity models as a theoretical foundation, provide a typology of the resulting deterministic tipping points, and discuss their implications for management. Then, we focus on hazard rate modeling for optimal resource management with stochastic and unknown tipping points. We discuss Bayesian learning, strategic behavior among agents, and the advancement in integrated assessment modeling with multiple and interacting tipping points. Finally, we examine the new contributions of experimental economics to understanding decision-making processes in the presence of tipping points. The paper concludes by highlighting the main advances in the literature and outlining future research directions, ultimately aiming to encourage further investigation and the development of innovative tools to address global challenges.

Combating environmental degradation requires global cooperation. We here argue that institutional designs for such efforts need to account for human behavior. The voyage of the Titanic serves as an analogous case to learn from, and we use behavioral insights to identify critical aspects of human behavior that serve as barriers or opportunities for addressing the challenges we face. We identify a set of public goods that may help us mitigate identified negative aspects of human behavior, while leveraging the positive aspects: standards and best practices, mechanisms for large-scale coordination, and curation of information to raise awareness and promote action. We use existing international organizations, providing at least one of these capacities, as cases to learn from before applying our insights to existing institutional solutions for global environmental protection. We identify institutional design features that, if adapted to better account for human behavior, could lead to more effective institutional solutions.

Food production significantly impacts Earth's systems and accounts for approximately a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. To create a more sustainable food system, scientific evidence emphasizes replacing consumption of certain types of protein with high environmental impact such as beef and pork, with protein with less-impact alternatives such as fish or vegetable protein. This study evaluates a nudge intervention at a medium sized grocery store designed to increase purchases of fish. Alongside it also examines other relevant factors influencing protein choice, such as values, attitudes, habits, demographics and price. To assess the nudge's impact a natural field experiment was designed, and the effect was measured by observing changes in sales of fish (over 59,000 items sold over 143 days). Additionally, data was collected from a selected sample of customers (N = 147) to further explore protein choice determinants. The results fail to demonstrate a significant effect of the nudge intervention. Instead, values, habits, attitudes and price significantly influence protein selection. These findings underscore the complexity of shopping decisions and how nudge interventions are not always easy to implement, adding important null findings to the available literature. Policy implications and possible improvements are discussed, emphasizing the need to account for habits and habit-breaking when designing interventions that aim to steer similar shopping decisions.

Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) are significant for poverty alleviation, but are threatened by over-exploitation and climate change effects such as drastic drops in regrowth rates. How will fishers adapt? To shed light on this, we ran a common-pool resource experiment with SSF fishers in Thailand. Our results show that groups confronted with a potential abrupt drop in the regrowth rate are more likely to form cooperative agreements compared to groups not confronted with such a drop, which theory cannot predict. However, groups that form cooperative agreements do not necessarily manage the resource efficiently; many groups under-exploit. Over-exploitation is driven by individual characteristics, e.g., if individuals can diversify income, and if they are born outside the village. We conclude that more systematic exploration of the role of socio-economic factors, and how these factors interact with ecological conditions facing fishers, are needed. Our work can be seen as one step in this direction.

Littering is a problem in many human societies. In this study, 9 individual street bins were manipulated on a central street in the city of Ga center dot vle, Sweden. The aim was to explore if changing the appearance of the bins, thereby manipulating the different types of social norms they signal, can increase the amount of trash they collect and mitigate littering. A field experiment tested the effectiveness of two alternatives to the conventional grey street bin; one bin foliated with pictures drawn by school children containing a normative anti-littering message (explicit norm), and one bright orange salient bin (implicit norm). Observed behavioral data was collected, and both the weight and volume of trash in the bins were measured each day for a period of one month. The results showed a tendency for the salient orange bin to increase trash collection compared to other bins; an effect most tangible towards the end of the weeks. The biggest effect was, however, that the explicitly normative bin reduced trash collection overall. These results provide lessons on how the appearance of bins can influence trash collection, potentially resulting in both desirable and undesirable outcomes.