Why do some communities experience better dietary and health outcomes than others, even when they appear to face similar challenges?
To me, at the heart of this societal challenge is scale.
We operate as a society across individuals, households, communities, institutions, and systems, yet we often are biased by whichever level we inherently work within or lean towards. As such, data is limited in how useful it is unless we can see how patterns at one scale influence outcomes at another. That is why interactive data visualisation is not a luxury; it is essential. Without it, the connections that drive complex societal challenges remain hidden in plain sight.
Developing Local Spotlights to Support Local Action
I have recently joined Professor Michelle Morris’s Nutrition and Lifestyle Analytics (NALA) team at the University of Leeds, working with The Food Foundation as part of the Actionable Insights to Tackle Dietary Inequalities project. Here, we are working with local authorities to develop Local Spotlights, an initiative designed to help local authorities better understand how their efforts to address dietary inequalities are shaping the health and wellbeing of the communities they serve.
With so much local data that is either out of reach, nascent, underused, or poorly understood, my role is to help develop an interactive dashboard that combines national datasets on deprivation, food insecurity, and food environments with local intelligence relating to food access, community assets and planning policies.
Can local action make a difference?
The reason for this is that it remains unclear the extent to which local authority action and community assets can influence dietary and health outcomes when considering their food and social environment. While deprivation, food insecurity and the local food environment are known to shape health, less is understood about the role that local interventions can play in strengthening community resilience and improving outcomes.
These interventions can take many forms, including investment in community food hubs, food pantries and social supermarkets that improve access to affordable healthy food; support for community gardens and growing projects that strengthen food skills and social connections; targeted Healthy Start uptake campaigns; school food and holiday hunger programmes; and partnerships with local retailers to improve the availability and promotion of healthier options. Planning policies can also play a role through restrictions on new fast-food outlets near schools, while active travel and public transport initiatives can improve access to supermarkets and community food services.
Together, these interventions may help explain why some communities achieve better diet and health outcomes than would be expected from their deprivation profile alone. Understanding where and under what conditions local action can mitigate wider structural inequalities is therefore a key challenge, and one that requires bringing together data on place, policy and community assets at multiple scales.
More than a dashboard
Importantly, the dashboard is not simply a repository for data. It is designed as a tool for exploration and progressive engagement. Through interactive visualisations, users can move between national patterns and local realities, identifying where a community follows broader trends and where it stands apart. This allows local authorities to combine highly specific local knowledge with national evidence, helping them identify what is working, where challenges remain, and where resources can be targeted most effectively.
Lessons from Food Systems Research
This role shares many similarities with my previous work in the Climate Impact Group through the FoSTA-Health project. There, I worked alongside researchers and stakeholders across southern Africa to develop future food system scenarios, combining stakeholder knowledge, policy ambitions, and local priorities within integrated modelling frameworks. The aim was to understand how food systems might evolve under different futures and what those changes could mean for health, agriculture, trade, and the environment.
On the surface, FoSTA-Health and Local Spotlights appear very different. Yet both are fundamentally concerned with the same challenge: understanding how different systems create different outcomes for different people. Both require we navigate data in a careful and considered way that ensures the veracity of information across different scales. A local intervention can influence a community. National policy can influence an entire population. Global pressures such as climate change can reshape food systems altogether. These scales are interconnected, even when they appear separate.
Connecting Systems, Communities and Resilience
Increasingly, I find myself interested in bringing these different perspectives together. By connecting local data with systems thinking and statistical methods we can begin to understand societal resilience more comprehensively. This piece by Andy Challinor and colleagues discusses the societal implications and opportunities around the multiscale nature of food system transformation, extending concepts such as One Health and systems thinking, encouraging us to look at how individual and community actions are essential to driving food system transformation. Another example closer to home is that of Healthier Fleetwood, a local initiative driven by community cohesion to tackle health challenges in a vibrant yet embattled coastal town.
Why Visualisation Changes Everything
The implications of such perspectives, initiatives, and interactions for the world we now live in are clear to many of us, but we can only connect so many dots before we need some help. Very often, we are missing such a tool: a catalyst with which we can propel and guide ourselves. This is where interactive visualisations based on the careful consideration of novel data sets, such as those Local Spotlights will provide, are non-negotiable. They allow users to move from neighbourhood to local authority, from local authority to region, and from region to national context. In doing so, they help build a continuous and intuitive evidence base upon which clear, actionable, decisions can be made across complex food systems, whilst being confident of how and why these might play out as local realities.
For me, this is where the work of The Food Foundation and Local Spotlights becomes particularly exciting. Interactive data visualisations can transform passive information into active understanding. By allowing users to explore their own areas, compare themselves with others, and investigate relationships between different indicators, they create interest, investment, and ownership. In turn, this encourages the collection of richer and more consistent local data, strengthening the evidence base over time: organic growth of a research resource.
The Challenge Ahead
The greatest challenge of this work, then, is to make sure we kickstart that catalytic process by identifying entry points in terms not only of data availability and collaborator capabilities, but also of which statistics allow us to traverse scale and join those dots. I look forward not only to addressing these challenges, but continuing to engage as momentum builds, and partnerships and insights develop that demonstrate the power of data, interactive visualisations, and, above all, our working together.
