Agrifood transformation for a livable climate & ocean future

In its flagship Recipe for a Livable Planet report, the World Bank found that 

Agrifood is a bigger contributor to climate change than many think. It generates almost a third of GHG emissions, averaging around 16 gigatons annually. This is about one-sixth more than all of the world’s heat and electricity emissions.

This has several far-reaching practical implications:

1. Excessive global heating emissions from agriculture, land use, and the wider agrifood processing and distrubtion value chain contribute to accelerating climate disruption, which interferes with sustainable food production.
2. Degraded food production conditions lead to further industrial food system activities, which release still more emissions, creating a vicious cycle of accelerating degradation, disruption, impact, and cost.
3. This also means the financing of food systems, from farm to fork, need to better account for the costs of unsustainable practices, or hidden costs will proliferate and food security will become more widespread. 
4. Depletion of agricultural and farm-adjacent ecosystems is a further compounding impact of this vicious cycle. 
5. This also means that restoration of ecosystems can significantly reduce global heating emissions from agriculture and land use, while stabilizing food production against further impacts of global heating.
6. The complexity of food systems—from farm to fork, including the diverse socio-economic conditions of producers, retailers, and consumers—means value chain approaches can activate more leverage points for meaningful change.
7. The intimate connection between food production and Earth systems—including glaciers and watersheds, biodiversity and major climate patterns—means data needs to become more of an everyday tool for more actors across food system value chains. 
8. Better integration of innovative data solutions can allow even micro-scale food producers (subsistence-level and smallholder farmers, for example) to improve contributions to the health and resilience of ecosystems, and by extension to climate stability and resilience. 
9. Such data systems can then open up new sources of financing—from the public, private, multilateral, and philanthropic sectors—for agroecological and climate-smart food production practices. 
10. The agrifood sector is, currently, one of the primary contributors to global heating and climate destabilization; it has the potential to lead the way to a future of value-building climate-resilient development. 

The Recipe for a Livable Planet report also found that 3/4 of global heating emissions from the agrifood sector come from developing countries, including 2/3 from middle-income countries. Make or break livelihoods are dependent on current practices, and need to shift in ways that allow everyone to transition safely to a new model that is safer, more resilient, and which should be more economically stable and beneficial. 

Industrial food systems that adopt new, low emissions practices, including nature-positive regenerative farming, at scale, can drive a global shift in agrifood climate pollution, risk and resilience profiles. Because food systems touch every person and every place, every day, this process of coordinated competitive innovation can be the foundation for a better future of integral human development. 

The report identifies a series of specific opportunities. We share here the overview provided in the report: 

• The agrifood system is a huge, untapped source of low-cost climate change action. Unlike other sectors, it can have an outsize impact on climate change by drawing carbon from the atmosphere through ecosystems and soils.
• The payoffs for investing in cutting agrifood emissions are estimated to be much bigger than the costs.Annual investments will need to increase by an estimated 18 times, to $260 billion a year, to halve current agrifood emissions by 2030 and put the world on track for net zero emissions by 2050. Previous estimates show that the benefits in health, economic, and environmental terms could be as much as $4.3 trillion in 2030, a 16-to-1 return on investment costs.
• Some of the cost can be paid for by shifting money away from wasteful subsidies, but substantial additional resources are needed to cover the rest. The costs are estimated at less than half the amount the world spends every year on agricultural subsidies, many of them wasteful and harmful for the environment.
• Mitigation action in agrifood brings with it many other benefits for people and the planet. Among the benefits are increased food security and resilience, better nutrition for consumers, improved access to finance for farmers, and conservation of biodiversity.
• Mitigation in the agrifood system can contribute in many ways to a just transition. This could secure jobs, good health, livelihoods, and food security for vulnerable groups and smallholder farmers.

Returning to the subject of data systems, it is important to note the Good Food Finance discussions around data systems integration and strategies for application of multidimensional metrics. The core finding of these Good Food Finance data discussions is that we must consider the human—health, opportunity, culture, risk and impacts. 

For instance, these principles from the Good Food Finance Blueprint for Data Systems Integration: 

1. Prioritize personal data security, accuracy and accountability, non-distortionary practical applications, and the rights and wellbeing of people over the inclination to deploy data systems to raise funds for commercial endeavors;
2. Treat that principled approach as the best way to provide strong evidence for both financial and non-financial return from integrated data systems designed to support good food finance mobilization and accountability;
3. Aim to limit AI usage in early exploratory integration to non-generative processing functions, to improve speed and reliability, not to tell new non-evidentiary stories about the underlying information; 
4. Consider the human element, including the need for direct human-scale benefits to producers, consumers, communities, to human health and the health of nature, and to create systems that have room for intermediary services.

Coastal regions are vulnerable to many forms of ecosystem degradation, suffering impacts from degraded watersheds, ecosystem breakdown and forest depletion, agricultural runoff into rivers far upstream, and the effects of ocean oxygen loss and sea level rise. Leveraging agrifood transformation to support improvements across all of these areas of risk will be critical for the future security and wellbeing of coastal communities in every region of the world. 

At this hour, climate talks are ongoing in Bonn, Germany, which are considering new integrated and holistic approaches to climate-smart food systems transformation, as well as cooperative de-risking and cofinancing strategies. For the first time, we are hearing calls for “ocean-based” NDCs (national climate plans for Paris compliance), opening up the real opportunity for summit-to-seabed climate-resilient investment and development strategies.