Sugar taxation for climate and sustainability goals

Lewis C. King () and Jeroen Bergh
Additional contact information
Lewis C. King: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Jeroen Bergh: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Nature Sustainability, 2022, vol. 5, issue 10, 899-905

Abstract: Abstract Meeting environmental sustainability goals while simultaneously recovering from the health and economic crises arising from the coronavirus pandemic requires creative policy solutions. Sugar taxation presents one such policy as sugar crops are arguably the least efficient to consume from a health perspective but the most efficient for biofuel production. Here we analyse the sustainability co-benefits of reducing sugar consumption through redirecting existing sugar cropland to alternative uses. Emissions could fall 20.9–54.3 Mt CO2e yr−1 if the EU were to reduce its sugar consumption in line with health guidelines and the excess Brazilian sugar cane redirected to ethanol. These savings would be around four times higher than an alternative strategy of afforesting existing EU sugar beet cropland and double those from producing sugar beet ethanol in the European Union. Achieving this through policies aimed at behavioural change, with a serious role for sugar taxation, would not only reduce the environmental impacts of biofuels but also provide health and economic benefits.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00934-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natsus:v:5:y:2022:i:10:d:10.1038_s41893-022-00934-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/natsustain/

DOI: 10.1038/s41893-022-00934-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Sustainability is currently edited by Monica Contestabile

More articles in Nature Sustainability from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().