Future Dietary Transformation and Its Impacts on the Environment in China

Abstract

Meeting China’s future food consumption needs without increasing the environmental burden is one of the largest sustainability challenges in the ensuing decades. China is a typical urban–rural binary society, and there is a certain gap in the diets of urban and rural residents. With the advancement of urbanization, the future trend of Chinese urban and rural residents’ diets and its impact on the environment is a topic worth exploring. This study intends to examine the future changes in dietary intake of urban and rural residents in China as well as their impact on carbon emissions, virtual water, and arable land. These results indicate that the trend of decreasing grain consumption and increasing animal food consumption in China over the next 30 years will continue. However, the gap in per capita consumption of ruminant meat, aquatic products, and eggs between urban and rural residents will not be narrowed in the future. The combination of structural demand trends and population urbanization will likely impose stress on domestic food supplies over the long term. In addition, the burden of the dietary environment in China will further increase in the future, especially in urban areas, but rural areas will significantly decrease with a decrease in population size. In theory, if three alternative dietary scenarios are adopted, the environmental impact of Chinese residents’ diets can be significantly reduced in the future. More specifically, the demand gap for carbon emissions, virtual water, and arable land for urban residents’ diets in the future will exhibit heterogeneity under three alternative dietary scenarios. To achieve the long-term goals of ensuring food safety and sustainable environmental development in China in the future, it is necessary to take multiple measures, such as consuming a reasonable and balanced diet, reducing food waste, increasing agricultural technology investment, and increasing the import of resource-intensive food.