Introducing a comprehensive and configurable tool for calculating environmental and social footprints for use in dietary assessments

The urgent need to transform dietary patterns to mitigate climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental challenges is well-established. While life cycle assessments and footprinting approaches provide valuable insights at the product level, comprehensive evaluations of entire diets are necessary to inform sustainable food choices. This paper presents the Sustainability Assessment of Foods And Diets (SAFAD)-tool, an open-source platform designed to assess the environmental and social impacts of foods and diets across nine European countries. SAFAD extends existing methodologies by offering expanded data coverage, multi-dimensional sustainability indicators, and customizable parameters for enhanced applicability. In its basic configuration, the tool includes footprints of 1804 food items, ranging from raw primary commodities like tomatoes, bananas and chicken meat, to composite foods, meals and drinks compatible with those used in dietary surveys, like different types of bread, pizza and ready-to-drink coffee. We describe the underlying methodology and demonstrate the tool's capability to evaluate dietary transitions. The tool integrates ten key indicators, including carbon footprint, biodiversity loss, and novel metrics for animal welfare and antibiotic use, enabling a comprehensive assessment of dietary sustainability. The tool's configurability allows users to adjust food waste levels, countries of origin, recipes, and emission factors, facilitating scenario analyses of mitigation strategies. Future research should focus on expanding geographic coverage, refining sustainability metrics, and integrating health-related indicators to provide a more comprehensive evaluation of dietary patterns. The SAFAD-tool simplifies the assessment of the environmental sustainability of different dietary patterns captured in dietary surveys, while also enabling the assessment of any diet, defined either as ready to eat meals or raw commodities, or a mix. • Presents SAFAD – a tool to assess environmental impacts of foods and diets. • Estimates example quantitative results for commodities, foods, meals, and diets. • Includes novel indicators for animal welfare and antibiotic use. • Enables customized assessments through flexible configuration. • Identifies trade-offs and synergies in dietary sustainability.