Providing school meals for every child in the world will not be free – but the potential benefits could be enormous for both the climate and global health, according to a new study. The idea is simple: children may hold the key to creating a better world, says a researcher.
Ensuring that all children worldwide receive healthy and sustainable school meals by 2030 could deliver a major boost to both global health and the climate.
That is the conclusion of new global calculations carried out by a research group involving more than 1,400 researchers and doctors from 130 countries.
The Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition – the think tank behind the work – supports the 112 member countries of the Global School Meals Coalition. Silvia Pastorino of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine presented the main conclusions from the calculations to the world at COP28 in Dubai in 2023.
A new study led by Marco Springmann and published in The Lancet Planetary Health builds on this analysis, using a global model to explore what might happen if every child received at least one school meal a day by 2030.
To do this, they combined data on school meals, dietary patterns, food prices, environmental footprints and disease risk to estimate both what the programme would cost and how the world might benefit in return – in the form of better health, a lower climate impact and reduced costs in the long term.
“One third of the world’s CO₂ emissions come from food systems, and the quality of our diets has a huge impact on public health. If school meal programmes are designed to create lifelong changes in eating habits, they can have an immediate effect,” explains Donald Bundy, Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who leads the research consortium and is a researcher behind the calculations.
What children eat at school can shape a lifetime of health
According to Donald Bundy, researchers and countries from across the world have contributed to the project, which has attracted considerable attention from policy-makers and organisations since it was presented at COP28.
Food concerns everyone on the planet. That is precisely why school meals matter so much: what children learn to eat early in life often stays with them.
Children who become accustomed to unhealthy and climate-intensive foods are more likely to continue those habits as adults. Healthy and sustainable meals at school can pull in the opposite direction.
“What we do in our early years at school stays with us for the rest of our lives. What we eat affects our health throughout life – and it also affects the health of the planet. That suggests we need to take school meal programmes much more seriously,” says Donald Bundy.
The global costs – and the global gains
The cost of providing all children worldwide with a healthy and sustainable school meal programme by 2030 would amount to around 0.1% of gross domestic product in high-income countries versus closer to 1% in low-income countries.
These are significant costs – but they are matched by significant benefits.
According to the model, school meals could reduce undernourishment in vulnerable populations by about a quarter. The explanation is simple: when children receive an extra meal at school, there is less pressure on the food that families would otherwise have to provide at home.
The researchers also estimate that more than 1 million deaths per year from noncommunicable diseases could be avoided globally in the current generation of children if some of the healthier eating habits persist into adulthood.
School meals could reshape the food system
In addition, the analysis shows that the environmental impact of food could be roughly halved if school meals are based on healthy and sustainable ingredients and if less food ends up in the bin. The focus is not only about CO₂ emissions but also how much land and water are used and how much pollution food production creates.
Overall, the calculations show that school meal programmes require large investment now – but also that part of the investment could be recouped later. The researchers therefore looked not only at the cost of the food itself but also at what society could potentially save if fewer people became ill and if climate damage was reduced.
“Perhaps we are more enthusiastic than we should be, but we believe that school meal programmes have enormous potential to do something positive for global health and for the health of the planet. We can also see that more and more people are coming round to the idea that this could be a way to create a better world,” says Donald Bundy.
The researchers have also carried out implementation research led by Silvia Pastorino and developed practical tools that governments can use when translating the figures into real meals on real plates. The tools are designed to help countries strike a balance between nutrition, sustainability, local food systems and economic realities and are currently being tested by research teams in Kenya and Rwanda.
