Food systems, as they operate today, are not operationally structured to meet the food security and planetary health needs of a growing global population. Climate disruption is eroding productive capacity and degrading natural systems, while industrial food production is a major contributor to climate disruption. The cycle is dangerous, easy to see, very costly, and getting worse.

This is why we need for a new Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation. The Platform (CIP)—initiated by the Good Food Finance Network and developed in partnership with multilateral finance institutions—will serve as a kind of scaffolding around which innovative multi-sector cooperative financing arrangements can be designed, capitalized, activated, and built upon, to bring health-building food security value to the whole economy. This is needed to make affordable nutrition the everyday standard in countries at all income levels.

The Food System Economics Commission (FSEC) calculates that since April 22, 2016—the day the Paris Agreement was signed at UN Headquarters in New York—the hidden costs of unsustainable food systems amount to more than US$150 trillion ($15.428 trillion per year or $42.27 billion per day). During the 13 days of the COP30 negotiations, in November, the total cost and waste of unsustainable food systems rose by $549.5 billion. That waste is unnecessary and preventable; structural changes are needed, starting with enabling policies, rapid uptake of new, sustainable production practices, and evidence-based innovations in financing models.

To lay the foundation for a fast-moving transformation of food systems, so disruptions improve lives and livelihoods, rather than putting them at risk, we need a rapid infusion of capital that also provides new kinds of financial and non-financial benefifts to all involved. In other words: We need a shared project of intentional investment to achieve multidimensional upgrading of local and global segments of our food production and distribution systems.

The first priority is to map out future savings from better practices, including health savings, which the FSEC report finds to be the most substantial area of future savings from improved food systems, followed by savings on climate disruption impacts. Together, health and climate-related savings can be enough to prevent the fiscal collapse of nation states under increasing pressure in this era of polycrisis. We can convert those forecasted future savings into present-day investment dollars, through cooperative de-risking approaches and targeted co-investments aimed at shoring up the most vulnerable places and practitioners.

Four years of consultation, concept evolution, ambition-setting, and barrier analysis, have brought four priority areas into focus:

1. Regenerative and agro‑ecological production – soil‑building, biodiversity‑friendly farming, Nature restoration, and better livelihoods;
2. Resilient logistics – low‑cost, modular storage, cold‑chain, and last‑mile distribution, as well as other sustainable infrastructure needs;
3. Health‑focused practices, data, and mainstreaming – market access for nutrient‑dense foods and transparent labeling, increasing market opportunity for sustainably produced foods and verifiability for investors seeking health, nutrition, environmental, and development benefits;
4. Expansion of access – supporting universal access to and affordability of health-building, sustainably produced foods.

To support value-building progress across these areas, the new Co-Investment Platform will aim to marshal US $10 billion of core catalytic capital from public‑sector and philanthropic sources, multilateral development finance institutions (MDFIs), and select private-sector core capital providers, incuding institutional investors positioned to benefit from tailored allocations of patient capital. A structured finance architecture will leverage 8 to 15 times more private‑sector capital—targeting US $150 billion of additional private investment over ten years.

During that time, the Platform will also serve as a hub for technical assistance to support frontier innovation, mainstreaming of best practices, sustainability and resilience valuation, and other multidimensional tracking of non-financial performance. The aim is not to serve as the sole vehicle for innovative financing or as the sole standard-setter for performance tracking, but rather to help discover, distribute, and mainstream, the best examples of both.

Though ambitious, the total starting goals are relatively modest, if compared to the scale of the system that needs transforming. The FSEC projection of cost and waste from unsustainable food systems is more than 1,000 times the projected $150 billion over ten years. There is a lot more work to do, clearly, and early success can lead to important new efficiencies and added investment and value-building capacity.

A further 10-year growth strategy will be developed within the first five years, with years 6-10 serving to expand overall capacity, resourcing, and wider catalytic funding impact. Alongside the expanded strategy for years 11-20, the CIP will also begin to establish 50-year institutional value-stabilization strategies, to provide for longer-term sovereign investment planning and cooperative sustainable food security partnerships, across sectors.

2045 will be year 20. By that time, the global food system will need to be almost totally climate-aligned, or it will not be sufficiently productive and resilient to meet the needs of a growing global population—which is expected to be experiencing increasingly strained economic and political conditions. Aligning national fiscal stability and sovereign wealth priorities with sustainable food systems that restore nature, improve health and livelihoods, and drive climate-resilient development, will be critical to securing a livable future.

We invite institutions, governments, investors, and fund managers, as well as foundations and multilateral institutions, to reach out, with questions or interest in participating. A core group of founding partners will be announced soon. If you are interested in supporting this effort, or learning more about how to participate, write to food@climatevalue.net