Environmental assessment of diets: overview and guidance on indicator choice.

Comprehensive but interpretable assessment of the environmental performance of diets involves choosing a set of appropriate indicators. Current knowledge and data gaps on the origin of dietary foodstuffs restrict use of indicators relying on site-specific information. This Personal View summarises commonly used indicators for assessing the environmental performance of diets, briefly outlines their benefits and drawbacks, and provides recommendations on indicator choices for actors across multiple fields involved in activities that include the environmental assessment of diets. We then provide recommendations on indicator choices for actors across multiple fields involved in activities that use environmental assessments, such as health and nutrition experts, policy makers, decision makers, and private-sector and public-sector sustainability officers. We recommend that environmental assessment of diets should include indicators for at least the five following areas: climate change, biosphere integrity, blue water consumption, novel entities, and impacts on natural resources (especially wild fish stocks), to capture important environmental trade-offs. If more indicators can be handled in the assessment, indicators to capture impacts related to land use quantity and quality and green water consumption should be used. For ambitious assessments, indicators related to biogeochemical flows, stratospheric ozone depletion, and energy use can be added.

Combining service design and discrete choice experiments for intervention design: An application to weather index insurance.

In this paper we provide a detailed description of the methodological steps involved in conducting a Service Design study in combination with Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs). It complements the conceptual and epistemological argument developed for this methodological combination in Osborne et al. (2021, World Development, in review WD-19535). Service Design for the co-creative development of policy interventions in complex adaptive systems involves an iterative process of moving between the six methodological stages of (1) problem co-definition, (2) actor-centred mapping, (3) experience-based problem diagnosis, (4) rapid prototyping, (5) design and testing and (6) upscaling. We suggest using DCEs as a quantitative method that is contextually adaptable and comparatively fast and cheap to implement, as part of stage (6) design and testing. Whilst both methods can operate independently with their own strengths and limitations, we find their combination to add value to the processes and outcomes of each. We illustrate the general methodological approach with a step-by-step description of its application to Weather Index Insurance in eastern Uganda. Bullet points: • Service Design co-creatively develops well-targeted solutions in complex adaptive systems. • Discrete Choice Experiments quantitatively elicit actors' preferences over the design of goods or services. • Their combination can bring deeply contextualised, user-centred, operational and experimentally verified ideas for development interventions prior to their implementation.