Climate-friendly food advertising and procurement in English local authorities: A systematic scoping review of policy ambition

To meet their climate targets, local governments globally have recently developed food procurement and advertising policies to promote sustainable food systems and influence consumption behaviours. As this is a nascent area of policy, exploring documents produced across the policy development process, including policy proposals, would provide insight into current policy intent, political momentum, how climate-friendly actions are being operationalised, and their potential impact. This scoping review systematically identified and characterised climate-friendly food advertising and procurement policies developed by English local authorities. The review was conducted according to PRISMA guidelines. Relevant documents were identified by searching websites of all English local authorities, Google, and relevant websites using key search terms. Eligible documents pertained to policies that: related to food or the food system; were at any stage of the policy development process; were developed by an English local authority; focused on outdoor advertising or procurement; were framed by the local authority as directly or implicitly promoting environmental sustainability; were publicly available; and published after 1 January 2014. Screening of full documents, data extraction and coding were conducted in duplicate and independently. Five local authorities had developed a publicly available climate-friendly food advertising policy, and 23 a procurement policy. Two advertising policies proposed restricting advertisement of animal-based food/drinks. Common procurement policy actions related to locally sourcing food/drinks (n = 22), changing availability of procured foods/drinks (n = 14), mainly increasing the provision of plant-based options, and procuring products (e.g., meat and dairy) that meet production and farming accreditations/standards (n = 16). These were mainly applied to council contracts and tenders, and council-run meetings and events. Of the 167 individual policy actions contained in included procurement policies, 19 were deemed mandatory. Overall, the few publicly available policies identified varied widely in scope and specificity, and most were non-mandatory. While the study focused on English local authorities, the findings are relevant to other countries exploring similar approaches within local government. National-level policies and standards could help create consistency and accountability across local authorities, ensuring proposed policies are robustly designed and implemented to achieve their intended environmental impacts.