3 ideas from the first episode of our new podcast, highlighting the importance of systems thinking for food and climate solutions

Elevating systems-level solutions is central to our work at the Global Alliance. It’s in this vein of solutions-sharing and systems thinking that this week the Global Alliance launched a collaboration with Foundations Platform F20. Alongside Stefan Schurig, Secretary-General of the F20 platform, I’m thrilled to be co-hosting the new podcast, Accelerating Climate Solutions.

Over the next several months, Stefan and I will be speaking with guests from across international politics, science, climate, philanthropy, and civil society. Our conversations will unravel the opportunities, tensions, and divergences that are shaping today’s discourse about the climate emergency.

There’s so much evidence imploring us to act, and countless examples of ways we could do it — including by factoring food systems into national climate action plans. This should be of particular focus for G20 countries, who are responsible for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And yet sustainable development is often held back as a result of powerful lobby groups, contradictory government policies, dominant business models, and mindsets stubbornly grounded in the status quo.

This podcast brings together different perspectives to discuss how we can clear those hurdles together.

In our first episode, we were joined by Dr. Martin Frick, Director of the World Food Programme’s Global Office in Berlin. Here are three standout ideas from that conversation and how they connect with our efforts at the Global Alliance.

• When asked if he could change one thing in global politics for the better, Dr. Frick wished that every farmer on this planet was seen as a crucial player in keeping our global ecosystem working and was remunerated accordingly. He went on to say that the thing that’s holding this back is that the majority of value chains don’t factor in the true social and environmental costs of bad food. This echoed efforts the Global Alliance has led around True Cost Accounting as a holistic approach to assess, measure, and value the positive and negative impacts of the food we eat. We also agree that the vital contributions of farmers are deeply undervalued!
• I appreciated how clearly Dr. Frick articulated the interconnectedness between what he described as the four C’s: conflict, climate, COVID, and costs (of food and energy) — rather than talking about them in silos. All have combined to create an emerging global food crisis that is linked to the impacts of climate change. Dr. Frick describes food systems transformation as a “powerful climate solution” when it comes to acting against the four C’s. We couldn’t agree more. In our Confronting the Climate Crisis with Food Systems Transformation report released earlier this year, we share case studies from 14 countries that demonstrate how food systems can contribute creative solutions to climate change. These stories provide inspirational pathways for systems-level actions that break free of the adverse interplay between the complex crises of today.
• When sharing some tangible solutions to climate change, Dr. Frick pointed to the significance of agroforestry and the managed grazing of cattle. Both help to restore soil fertility, contribute to local biodiversity, and support carbon sequestration. These renewable approaches to food production were around long before the industrialization of our food systems, but haven’t yet seen wide-scale adoption. They demonstrate how agroecology and regenerative agriculture can benefit food security — key approaches the Global Alliance calls to scale. Dr. Frick says that advancing these solutions can start at this weekend’s G7 Summit in Germany where leaders should make multi-year commitments underpinned by finance, along with a bottom-up multi-stakeholder agreement. This is something I’ll be watching for in the coverage.

Over the next several months, the Accelerating Climate Solutions podcast will share how we can collectively do better to bring about systemic change. We’ll also spend more time looking at how transformed food systems are a brilliant solution for a brighter future.

Guided by principles of decency, fairness, and love, I truly believe these values and systems thinking approach can get us through this period of disruption and upheaval. This podcast conversation left me with a sense of inspiration and optimism — I hope it will do the same for you.