By Anastasia Vayona, Roberta Discetti, Katherine M. Appleton, Jeffery Bray, Heather Hartwell, and J. Robert Britton.
This systematic review explores how different stakeholder groups—like consumers, indigenous populations, producers, and policymakers—understand the links between biodiversity loss and human diets. Biodiversity, which includes the variety of plant and animal species in an ecosystem, plays a vital role in food production, nutrition, and environmental sustainability. However, our food systems can impact biodiversity negatively, especially through practices like pesticide use, deforestation, and growing only one type of crop in a field. To address these challenges, it is essential to understand what various groups think about biodiversity and food choices so we can make more informed decisions to protect nature.
Our review gathered relevant studies to examine stakeholder awareness and perspectives on how food choices impact biodiversity. We analysed publications to see how each group views their role in protecting biodiversity through sustainable diet choices. This meant focusing on aspects such as consumer willingness to purchase sustainably produced foods, indigenous knowledge of diverse food sources, producer practices that support ecosystem health, and policymaker actions that can drive sustainable food policies. We developed a scoring system to select only the most relevant papers for full analysis, filtering studies based on pre-determined criteria. We fully reviewed studies with the highest scores, based on their focus on biodiversity-diet links, while we filtered out others with lower relevance.
The findings suggest that awareness of biodiversity varies widely among stakeholders, with consumers generally supportive of sustainable food options but often unaware of specific biodiversity impacts. Indigenous communities show strong connections between biodiversity and traditional food practices, while producers and policymakers play crucial roles in shaping food systems to support biodiversity.
This review highlights the need for more public education and stronger policies that support biodiversity through food choices, as well as the importance of learning from indigenous knowledge systems to promote sustainable diets globally.
Relational Thinking 