Thanks to a huge international community effort over the past few years, food systems are firmly on the global climate agenda.

Ahead of the Biodiversity COP in October and COP29 later this year, there’s an opportunity to build momentum to ensure food systems transformation is integrated into national biodiversity and climate targets. Global Alliance Executive Director, Anna Lappé, outlines the opportunities on the road to COP30 to elevate food systems transformation on the global agenda. 

When the curtains came down on COP28, the UN climate summit last year, it was a milestone in the global climate-food policy landscape. Food systems finally had its rightful place on the global climate agenda with a political declaration signed by 159 countries that stated a commitment to include food and agriculture in their updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs), due by COP30 in 2025. This outcome was years in the making with many actors—from civil society, governments, philanthropy, and frontline communities—pushing for food systems inclusion in the climate agenda.

2023 was a milestone year for bold calls for food system transformation for another reason, too: the FAO’s first estimate on the hidden, global cost of food made headlines. The UN agency calculated a staggering $12 trillion a year in hidden costs, from health systems impacted by soaring diet-related illnesses to soil and waterways polluted from fossil-fuel-based food systems to the low wages and economic precarity of workers in the agrifood sector.

At the Global Alliance of the Future of Food—a strategic alliance of two dozen philanthropic organizations working on transforming food systems—our origin story is linked to grappling with and exposing the hidden costs in the food system. More than a decade ago, founding members of the Global Alliance came together and recognized that a systems approach was necessary to expose the costs and consequences of a broken food sector, defined by increasing corporate control, influences of vested interests, and the effects of billions of dollars in harmful subsidies.

Read the full article on the F20 website.

The featured photo shows Eva spreading locally produced organic manure and compost on her field in Ghana. Photo by Sven Torfinn/Panos Pictures.