Aotearoa’s Food Environment Dashboard: Sharing and Holding to Account ^†

Abstract

Unhealthy diets and excess energy intake are the greatest contributors to disease and disability in Aotearoa. Unhealthy diets are heavily influenced by obesogenic food environments. Governments and the private sector have critical roles to play in creating healthier food environments, yet New Zealand consistently falls behind international best practice, suggesting a lack of accountability. The accountability cycle has five phases: setting the account, taking account, sharing the account, holding to account, and responding to the account. The ongoing monitoring of the healthiness of food environments is essential to identify key problems, assess the impact of policies, hold governments and food companies to their commitments, measure progress, and support future implementation. The Food Environments Dashboard Aotearoa was created to collate and translate more than a decade’s worth of food environment monitoring studies and their findings for policy-makers and public health advocacy groups to encourage policy change. Based on Australia’s Food Environments Dashboard, the key indicators from these studies have been identified and assessed against defined criteria to give a green (promotes health), amber (needs improvement) or red (unhealthy) rating. Data from studies implemented between 2014 and 2022 were reviewed and 65 key indicators were selected for ten domains: government, food composition, settings (schools, hospitals), food labelling, food affordability, food promotion, food retail, private sector, trade and investment, and equity. Most domains were assessed as red and none as green. The Dashboard contributes to sharing and holding to account by providing key indicators in an accessible format that will be regularly updated. We encourage the public health nutrition community of practice to contribute to, and utilise, the Dashboard to improve food environments for Aotearoa.