As climate disruption advances, critical anchoring elements of our planet’s life-sustaining systems are destabilized. This means rainfall and ecosystems are disrupted and dislocated, while watersheds and pollinator populations are depleted. And so, food security is becoming much harder to achieve.

Existing food systems are not sustainable. This is true both because of worsening climate disruption and because food systems operating at the scale they do today are creating harm across many dimensions of human security and wellbeing: 

• A 2018 study of food-related health in the United States found that only 12% of U.S. adults are metabolically healthy. This finding correlates with the intense vulnerability tens of millions of Americans had to the COVID-19 virus. 
• Malnutrition now affects the majority of people in most countries, when diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are included in the math. NCDs are killing 43 million people per year, with diets linked directly or indirectly to more than 3/4 of NCD cases.
• The depletion of watersheds, aquifers, and ecosystems, is making it more difficult and expensive to produce sufficient food for everyone. The United Nations finds we have entered into an “era of global water bankruptcy“.
• The Food System Economics Commission found that hidden costs (including health, climate, and Nature) add up to $15.428 trillion per year. For reference, only the U.S. and China have total annual economic activity larger than $15 trillion. 

All of this creates ripple effects that undermine community resilience and the everyday economy. Meanwhile, spending on climate-related disasters, both sudden shocks and long-running events like droughts, has soared in recent years, now reaching 4 to 10 times the level of the 1980s in many parts of the world. Health-related spending has also risen unsustainably, consuming ever more of the national budget. 

There are now 266 million people across 47 countries facing acute food insecurity, according to data from 2025. Famine has been confirmed to be taking place in both Sudan and Palestine, while: 

• “More than 80 percent of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity lived in protracted crisis contexts (33 countries/territories)”…
• “An estimated 35.5 million children were acutely malnourished across the 23 countries/territories experiencing nutrition crises, including just under 10 million with severe acute malnutrition.”
• “About 9.2 million pregnant and breastfeeding women were acutely malnourished across 21 countries/territories.”
• “In 2025, humanitarian and development financing to food sectors in food crisis contexts both declined, against a backdrop of persistently high global acute food insecurity.”

Repeated and prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz in 2026 is creating what could become an unprecedented global food crisis, as food supplies are disrupted, a major segment of global fertilizer supplies blocked, fuel costs rising sharply, embedding cost into everything, and food prices spiking around the world.

Sustainable development requires practices that increase instead of reducing sustainability, in both operational and environmental terms. Unsustainable debt is prohibitive and has the effect of reducing future investment opportunity, while siphoning money away from needed public investments. Unsustainable land use practices reduce resilience and create serious risk of harvest collapse, which could happen at the worst possible time. 

A recent Climate Value Exchange article on food security climate risk (FSCR) and related resilience measures concluded that: 

By reducing risk proactively and on the basis of evidence, across multiple dimensions of economic, human, and planetary health, leading localities and value chains can reduce barriers and create attractive environments for new outcome-focused investment. FSCR profiles should include elements of sustainable value chain planning, with cooperative de-risking and innovation incubation as central goals for short, medium, and long-term planning.

The Climate Value article also proposed four areas where institutional innovation and new modes of sustainable financing and data sharing can support reduced food insecurity and improved climate resilience: 

• Local soil ecology finance corporations (SEFCO) can manage data systems, aggregate and disaggregate financial flows, and prosper by providing verifiably independent, factual insights, to both investors and producers. 
• Co-investment management agencies can operate as public or private-sector entities, to provide coordination services, including capacity-building and insight-sharing for development of climate-smart local and regional value chains. 
• Field service practitioners can function as extension agents, supporting onboarding of new small-scale producers to sustainable cooperatives, through the adoption of new practices, with verifiable metrics. 
• Regenerative practice-focused insurers can bring a new kind of financing to rural communities, by establishing their own function as best-practice propagators that successfully reduce costs for public agencies and corporates. 

Innovative financing can support upgraded practices, improved output, enhanced resilience, and better livelihoods in agricultural communities. It can do this while ripple effects of unsustainable practices play out, if coordinated efforts are made to build resilience locally and through cooperative national and international structures. 

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Motivating new flows of sustianable finance

The mechanisms that could fit together in a policy-driven cooperative financing arrangement include: 

Multistakeholder sustainable impact bonds

A group of municipalities and regional governments can join together as issuers, integrating multidimensional performance metrics into a bonding contract, to support improved financing for small farmers to adopt regenerative land use practices, to protect and sustain watersheds and vital ecosystems. Micro-scale, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) offering data services, independent performance tracking, and financial disaggregation, to right-size investment flows, can diversify rural economies and help create resilient regional food systems. 

Resilience-focused debt restructuring

Multilateral finance institutions, working with philanthropies and with government agencies at multiple levels of jurisdiction, can invite sustainable financing from private investors and corporates, while eliminating unsustainable high-cost debt and replacing it with incentive-driven sustainable impact-oriented debt that drives sustainable development. The result would be: lower cost of borrowing for public institutions and MSMEs, reduced debt-servicing costs going forward, enhanced efficiency in public investment, and expanded private-sector investment for sustainable development. 

Cooperative de-risking 

Cooperative de-risking is a complex, multidimensional process that allows for long-term budget projections to support realigned up-front investment priorities aimed at relieving the extreme risk that often falls on the most vulnerable actors in the value chain. Small-scale farmers, herders, and remote market managers, can all see improved incomes and more stable market access, while value chains are strengthened and reliability of output is expanded. This makes room for an expansion of both public and private investment, and allows first-loss capital from development agencies and philanthropies to go to work. 

Science-driven small-scale farmland innovation

Scaling requires an intimate understanding of the hyper-local. Those actors best positioned to work at micro and small scales need to have a home inside of larger-scale investment flows. Readily available, well-translated, easy-to-use science insights can help micro- and small-scale producers rapidly improve sustainability performance, reducing risk, building resilience, and expanding the marketability of what they produce. Incentives that tie larger-scale corporate value chain managers and investors into the process of innovation on small, remote, vulnerable farms, can bring innovation to scale and create a whole new market for sustainably produced farm goods.