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• Consumers across five European countries perceive sustainability labels as helpful. • Across five European countries, preferences for product attributes were similar. • Meat and dairy consumers value animal welfare information more than environmental sustainability. Food production systems, especially meat and dairy supply chains, contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. An important question emerges as to whether consumers care about environmental sustainability when buying food products, as this can determine their consumption practices. Further, if sustainability labels are available, identifying information that is relevant to consumers is important. This research therefore aimed to identify the attributes that are most important for consumers when buying meat or dairy products and the perceived helpfulness of sustainability labels for meat and dairy products and important label properties. An online survey was conducted in five European countries (i.e. Czechia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK). Consumers valued similar attributes when buying meat and dairy products across all countries. Freshness , quality/taste and animal welfare emerged as the most important attributes, while environmental attributes such as food miles , carbon footprint , and organic production were the least important. Sustainability labels for meat and dairy products were perceived as helpful. Regression analysis identified similar patterns within all five countries regarding the predictors of the perceived helpfulness of sustainability labels. Attitudes towards sustainable food consumption , environmental attitudes , and food production and policies emerged as significant positive predictors in most models. Most importantly, information regarding animal welfare , food safety , and health and nutrition was perceived as being more important than environmental sustainability. This suggests that food choice decisions are unlikely to be made based on the environmental sustainability of a food product's production alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Western-European countries exceed the critical loads for nitrogen (N) losses. High nitrogen (N) inputs make agriculture one of the largest contributors to N pollution. There might be a potential to reduce this losses with an output tax on animal products, as they have low N use efficiency and a tax has the potential to reduce the consumption of this products. We want to assess the potential of a food tax on animal products to reduce the N surplus of Swiss agriculture. We implemented a tax on meat and a tax on milk and meat in the agent-based model SWISSland. The model combines an agent-based model with a microeconomic model at the farm scale. To better understand the low response of the food tax, we applied in a second step a robust two-step global sensitivity analysis of abatement costs of individual model agents. Imposing a tax led to an N surplus reduction of 2.1% where only meat was taxed and 2.3% where both milk and meat were taxed. The sensitivity analysis showed that distinct agents reacted non-uniformly to changing prices, so that the effect of the tax was sometimes even cancelled out. This calls for more differentiated policies to reduce the negative impact of N losses. The overall impact of the food tax was minor as the distinct agents react not uniformly to lower producer prices. [Display omitted] • Nitrogen surpluses of Swiss agriculture remain on a high level since the 90's. • We assessed the effects of a food tax on nitrogen surplus in the agent-based model SWISSland. • Food taxes on milk and meat products reduced nitrogen surpluses by 2.1% to 2.3%, respectively. • A robust sensitivity analysis on different model agents revealed that distinct agents react differently to varying prices. • Food taxes are not effective to reduce nitrogen surpluses as distinct farms react non-uniform to changing prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]