Food is an everyday need, an anchor of cultures and economies, a core element of household budgets, and a structural imperative for civilization itself. Food systems include vast networks of people and institutions, working at large and small scales, from global trade to local subsistence farming, with family-owned restaurants, local markets, and community kitchens in between. It is estimated the world spends, wastes, or loses, more than $15.4 trillion per year on unsustainable practices and unhealthy impacts of food systems, costing millions of lives, while climate disruption is making all of this worse.

At the same time, sustainable food security efforts have the potential to serve as the principle anchor of sustainable human development, economic opportunity, and shared prosperity, in all regions. This, in short, explains why I am working with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Environment (OCB) to identify sustainable funding strategies for building resilient food systems that promote both human and planetary health.

The Food System Economics Commission (FSEC) finding that food systems in their current state are generating $15.428 trillion per year in preventable cost, waste, and ripple effects, demands attention from authorities and institutions at all levels. Those costs are built into other prices across all economies, putting everyone at risk of destabilizing food price spikes, worsening inequality, and spreading poverty, hunger, and disease. Health and disaster management costs related to food are straining public budgets, forcing other needs to go unaddressed.

Planetary health considerations are becoming a more urgent and costly concern. Nature loss, declining biological diversity, reduced ecosystem integrity, and destabilized major climate patterns, are all making it harder to depend on Nature for adequate food production. Industrial practices have greatly expanded overall production over the last 80 years, but as planetary boundaries are breached and Earth’s “carrying capacity” declines, those solutions are no longer the best answer going forward.

Agriculture depends on ecosystems, biodiversity, watersheds, and climate patterns. As climate disruption accelerates, all of these core needs for sustainable agriculture are strained. The impacts of climate disruption also worsen climate disruption.

• Warmer ocean waters slow and disrupt ocean currents that help to anchor and structure major climate patterns.
• Melting glaciers and dislocated precipitation patterns mean there is less fresh water to maintain productive crops and adjacent ecosystems.
• These disruptions also alter microclimates and can lead to localized changes in temperature that are still more disruptive of specific plant species’ ability to thrive.
• Disrupted and degraded ecosystems alter the pathways for pathogens to spread, creating new risks of disease for plants, animals, and people.
• This can lead to less resilient natural landscapes, which manage fresh water less effectively and are more susceptible to drought and flooding.

Meanwhile, more people in more countries are facing novel forms of malnutrition. Undernutrition has increased globally since before the COVID-19 pandemic, and is also being driven by income inequality and inflation. Metabolic ill health is spreading, as more countries begin to depend on ultra-processed foods that are known to disrupt endocrine systems and create other health risks, including obesity, cardiovascular disease, and type-2 diabetes.

Whether any given community, region, or country can enjoy ongoing food security is dependent on prices, international trade dynamics, natural disasters, public incentives and fiscal stability. The convergence of climate disruption, Nature loss, declining biodiversity, and depletion of fresh water supplies, with ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict, and technological disruption, creates cascading risks and compounding costs.

Put simply: We cannot expect sustainable development, security, and prosperity, to happen automatically. The prospects for each are linked to these cascading risks. Food systems are one of the keys, because:

1. Societies cannot function if people cannot eat; sustainable food systems are economic engines and instruments for reducing the risk of conflict.
2. The range of people and institutions involved in food production, distribution, and consumption, spans the whole of society; food solutions are ways of mainstreaming resilience.
3. Sustainable food systems can help to solve costly crises including climate change, income inequality, and the spread of diet-related non-communicable diseases.
4. Regenerative farming practices can restore degraded lands, rebuild soil ecology, improve fresh water retention, and help to maintain and reestablish vital ecosystems, while slowing global heating.
5. The multidimensional approach to assessing operational value creation needed for cooperative food systems investment is a model for identifying sustainable value-building investments in other sectors.
6. Food systems require well-designed, well-maintained, locally appropriate infrastructure, which creates positive ripple effects.

My work with FAO is oriented toward supporting enhanced awareness of cooperative de-risking strategies, economic and political inclusion of stakeholders to improve policy design, and development of platforms for Earth science data-sharing and catalytic co-investments. We can turn around the food-related risks to human health and security, with innovation and cooperation, based on evidence, including input from affected communities.