Ensuring an Inclusive Farm to Fork Strategy: ACCTING Policy Brief #2

The European Green Deal aims to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, while ensuring a fair transition for all and that no one is left behind. However, policies designed to mitigate and adapt to climate change have largely failed to consider gendered and intersectional factors. This has resulted in uneven and unequal consequences for different social groups, with uncertain long-term impacts. 

Despite these insights, there remains a significant research gap regarding the exact nature and cause of unequal and unequalising effects of different policy and societal responses to climate change. The EU-funded ACCTING research project contributes to filling this gap by exploring the impacts of Green Deal policies on the individual and collective behaviour of vulnerable groups, and how policies can effectively integrate gendered and intersectional perspectives to address the climate crises, thereby promoting an inclusive and socially just European Green Deal. 

In this second policy brief, the ACCTING team outlines selected recommendations relating to the transition to sustainable food production and consumption. These focus on project insights highlighting drivers of, and barriers to, one of the sub-goals of the European Green Deal’s Farm to Fork strategy – (equal) access to sufficient, safe, nutritious, sustainable food. These recommendations are addressed to the European Commission both as a policymaker and as a funder of research. Knowledge gaps are translated into concrete research questions that can serve as inspiration for future research work programmes.