Innovation Type: Conservation Projects & Initiatives | A creative way to change behaviour around sustainable diets

Keywords

Innovation
Project Management

Date of Publication

01/09/2022

Problem

About 1/3 of gas emissions about 70% of biodiversity loss and 80% of forest loss are owed to the food system, production, and consumption. Unsustainable diets, the way we consume food today, are a major part of the problem. Children are a key target group to tackle the problem for two reasons. First, evidence has it that people adopt their eating habits at an early stage in their lives. Second, evidence has it that children's obesity owed to unhealthy (and unsustainable) diet patterns is a major problem in many countries of the “developed” world. It is a vicious circle: children adopt unsustainable patterns as a result of the eating habits of their parents, so they follow the same pattern as their parents.

Solution

The Picnic Basket project is focused on achieving behavior change through a playful school program on sustainable diets. This learning tool for children was scaled as part of the Food Practice Innovation Fund program. The Practice had decided to focus on capacity building alongside providing funding and therefore developed ‘Food Forward’, a 10-month learning journey facilitated in partnership with Impact Hub, to develop innovative projects on the topic of sustainable food systems.

Applying design thinking, the WWF teams in Greece, Turkey, and Romania changed how they worked and designed their programs - they went from designing the program for the education community to co-designing the project together with the end users (teachers & students) while ensuring flexibility in its implementation. And with the closing of schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the team again had to find different ways to achieve their objectives, as sending the physical basket with materials was not feasible in all locations.

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