Monitoring nutritional, environmental and social sustainability in school food settings: A three-dimensional score-based assessment tool

The UN School Meals Coalition acknowledges that for achieving the transition towards sustainable food systems, school canteens play a vital role. Providing school authorities with tailored and easily applicable approaches enabling them to evaluate and monitor sustainability performance across schools is needed. We develop the to date most comprehensive monitoring tool that can be straightforwardly used to evaluate nutritional, environmental, and social sustainability dimensions of school food environments. The tool has been designed via a replicable and transparent methodological approach implemented via a living lab to strengthen science-society-policy integration. Its 42 indicators and their measurement scales have been defined through a participatory process on the request of the government of Emilia-Romagna - one of the most densely populated regions of Italy. Indicator measurements are heterogenous and aggregated into a single sustainability score ranging from 0 to 75 points grouped into ten sustainability objectives which belong to the three sustainability dimensions. We provide an extensive sensitivity analysis which assesses the tool's transferability, scalability, and adaptability to school food contexts beyond Italy. The tool has been adopted as a binding monitoring framework by the regional government of Emilia-Romagna in September 2023.