Unleashing the potential of nature-positive food systems
Action Track 3 of the UN Food Systems Summit has built coalitions that can deliver systemic impact in the near future
By João Campari, Juan Lucas Restrepo, Rattan Lal, Leigh Ann Winowiecki, Izabella Koziell
Planet Earth works 24/7 to nourish us. We depend on nature for our food. But today, food production comes at the expense of nature and climate. Our food systems are the biggest driver of biodiversity loss, creating 80% of deforestation and 70% of biodiversity loss on land, 50% in freshwater, and one of the most significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Even with these impacts, there were as many as 811 million people going hungry in 2020. The message is clear: we must transform food systems for the benefit of people, nature and climate.
Transformation doesn’t just mean mitigating negative impacts — it also means unleashing the power of food systems to support thriving biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, which provide enough healthy and nutritious food for everyone, not to mention clean water and sequestering carbon.
The UN Food Systems Summit was convened by Secretary General Antonio Guttieres to accelerate this transformation. The Summit process has provided great opportunity to set the bar high on the level of ambition in driving urgent, impactful and scalable action. Global and national leaders need to mark out pathways for transformation with clear metrics, which include targets, KPIs and measurement frameworks, supported by the right policies and incentives. The Summit has also provided a great opportunity to increase multi-stakeholder collaboration and co-development of solutions that work on the ground and in the water, for nature, climate and people.
To deliver systemic transformation, the Summit´s Action Tracks have become vehicles to identify global challenges and deliver integrated solutions on nutrition, consumption, livelihoods, resilience and nature-positive production. We have had the honour to be members of a larger Core Team who led the formative stages of Action Track 3 on boosting nature-positive production at scale. When we formally came together in the last quarter of 2020, it would have been impossible to predict the amount of energy, passion and innovation that has gone into building the vibrant community which now exists. Excitingly, this community is now building cross-border partnerships and developing solutions with the potential to greatly advance nature-positive production.
The overarching goal of AT3 has been to ensure the fundamental human right to healthy and nutritious food, within planetary boundaries. Considering the necessity of working across all aspects of ecosystems to deliver this goal, AT3 was structured around three integrated strategies: protecting ecosystems from conversion for food and feed production; sustainably managing existing food production lands and waters; and restoring degraded ecosystems and rehabilitating soil health.This strategy and initial considerations were presented in a discussion starter paper in late 2020.
From the outset, we wanted to ensure AT3 was an inclusive community with transparent governance. Three public forums which attracted hundreds of participants were held in December, February and April, feeding into a bottom-up process for developing solutions. Government representatives, private sector leaders, food producers, scientists, UN agencies and individuals who care about the future of food all shared their ideas. In total we received 375 ideas which we reviewed, grouped and published in two waves (released in February and May), before distilling into 12 clusters, with every single idea tagged to a cluster.
This was an inspiring, motivating and eye-opening experience. It also reinforced the importance of collaboration and dialogue which we all know is fundamental for food systems transformation.
Take some of our coalitions as examples. The Coalition of Action for Soil Health has brought together stakeholders from science, civil society, finance, business and governments to facilitate the widespread adoption of practices that improve soil health through financial investment and policy action. Likewise, the Coalition for Aquatic and Blue Foods has brought attention to an area often neglected in conversations about food systems — the foods such as fish, shellfish, aquatic plants and algae, which are captured or cultivated in freshwater or marine ecosystems. By raising the profile of aquatic foods in the context of food systems transformation the coalition has demonstrated the potential of blue and aquatic foods to help end malnutrition and build nature-positive food systems.
We now hope to see the vast majority of these recognised and promoted as coalitions of the willing at the Food Systems Summit on 23rd September. This will be a key moment in attracting member states to help form and participate in coalitions, and ensure they are included in national pathways for food systems transformation.
So what else did we learn in the past year?
Firstly, the value of hearing diverse voices, all of which bring different perspectives and solutions to the platforms of discussion. There has been equal and inclusive representation in the group which has engaged in AT3 and, so far, the coalitions include 321 individuals from 195 organizations in 65 countries. This diversity has led to enriched discussions and made us all challenge our thinking and shift away from any preconceptions we may have had before the Summit process. There are many similarities in food systems across the world, but there are also many differences. It is imperative that we remember that and tantamount that local stakeholders are part of the development of local solutions, particularly farmers, fishers and food producers whose livelihoods depend on these systems.
Secondly, there is huge energy for nature-positive solutions and food systems thinking has definitely evolved from purely being about solving the problem of global hunger, to now also ensuring that we do so within planetary boundaries. Take the Pre-Summit of UNFSS as an example. We organised a plenary session on ‘The Triple Challenge of Food Insecurity, Biodiversity Loss and Climate Change’. It was attended by more than 2,500 people. There were dedicated sessions on Agroecology and Blue and Aquatic foods, both which were highlighted as key coalitions by the UN Deputy Secretary General in her closing remarks. Many other side events (including on repurposing public support to food and agriculture, Food systems governance, Deforestation-free, conversion-free food supply chains, Indigenous peoples’ food systems, Agrobiodiversity, Agroecology, Innovation, Mountain Food systems and Soil Health) were held, with great engagement, demonstrating how nature-positive production is resonating as a key topic with stakeholders all across food systems. Numerous member states are already supporting our coalitions. We are expecting to see the work we are carrying out feature heavily in many of the national pathways that will be outlined at the Summit.
Thirdly, tied to the evolution in thinking within the food sector, we cannot achieve anything in siloes. The incredible effort that has been made by everyone involved in AT3 over the past year has raised awareness of the need for nature-positive production and deeply integrated the food, nature and climate agendas. The UNFSS process, and all those involved, can be commended for adopting integrated thinking, but it needs to follow through into other summits and conferences. We hope to see world leaders putting food at the front and centre of the upcoming UNCBD COP15 and UNFCCC COP26 in the coming months and UNCCD COP 15 in 2022. Climate and nature need to receive top billing at the Tokyo Nutrition for Growth Summit in December. We need all stakeholders to take collective action and break the silos. Isolated actions won’t get us anywhere when we think about systems transformation, dots must be connected and action plans integrated.
The Summit is a momentous occasion. More than 140 national governments and over 80 Heads of State are expected to outline their commitments to transforming food systems. If they and the UN Secretary General adopt the level of ambition we hope to see, the Summit may go down in history as the moment in which food systems truly turned a corner, to becoming nature-positive, food-secure and with net-zero emissions.
Of course, the hard work is only just beginning. We now have to take the solutions that have been fostered over the past year and translate them into actions, with strong governance and incentive systems that are meaningful to local contexts and led by local stakeholders. But we can all be proud of the work AT3 has done together. Nature-positive production without a doubt received a boost from our collective efforts.
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João Campari is the Global Food Lead of WWF and Chair of AT3
Juan Lucas Restrepo is Director General of Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)
Rattan Lal is Director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Centre, Ohio State University; and winner of the World Food Prize in 2020
Leigh Ann Winowiecki is a Soil Systems Scientist with ICRAF
Izabella Koziell is Deputy Director General of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development
