Abstract
Food production and consumption present major sustainability challenges, and finding ways to reduce the environmental impact of food, for example through behavioural changes by consumers, is becoming increasingly important. In recent years, digital interventions have become important tools to change behaviours in many areas. In this review, we evaluate the status of current scientific knowledge of digital behaviour change interventions for sustainable food consumption practices. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist for how to conduct systematic reviews, we searched multiple databases for papers containing terms related to food, sustainability and digital behaviour change interventions. Only studies where the digital interventions were actually implemented and evaluated from a behaviour change perspective were included, resulting in 15 primary studies in the final review. The quality of the studies was evaluated from a behaviour change perspective, and the approaches used were categorised using two intervention frameworks, the Behaviour Change Wheel and the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy v1. The results show that all of the included studies had major quality issues when evaluated from a behaviour change perspective. This means that we could not find any evidence regarding whether the digital behaviour change interventions examined worked or not. Most studies further lacked theoretical grounding or a clear approach to how or why they should be effective for behaviour change for more sustainable food consumption practices. Our main recommendation for future research in the field is to expand from the current exploratory phase to conducting scientifically rigorous studies of higher quality, more thoroughly grounded in behaviour change theory and methods. Furthermore, based on our study, we suggest changes to the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy v1.
Highlights
Today, we face significant global sustainability challenges, where the food system is a major area of concern
Since our interest lies in understanding the current knowledge on digital behavioural change interventions for sustainable food consumption practices, we analysed primary studies in our corpus using the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) [10] framework
We compared the results of this review with three other reviews from different areas using either the Behaviour Change Wheel or the Behaviour Change Technique Taxonomy v1, concerning interventions for sedentary behaviour [14], transportation behaviour [13] and gamified mobile apps for health [3]
Summary
We face significant global sustainability challenges, where the food system is a major area of concern. Food and farming systems contribute up to 30% of greenhouse gas emissions [1]. Food production plays a significant role in the intersection of several planetary boundaries, such as biosphere integrity, land-system changes and biogeochemical flows [2]. Actions causing unnecessary climate and environmental impact occur at all phases of the food chain, including agriculture, processing and manufacturing, wholesale and logistics, retail and food services, as well as consumption (storing, cooking, etc.) and waste management. It is clear that the entire food system needs to change in a more sustainable direction [1]. Problems need to be analysed, opportunities for improvement need to be identified, and interventions need to be formulated to change current problematic states to more sustainable ones
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