Growing Better: Ten critical transitions to transform food and land use

The world faces a remarkable opportunity to transform food and land use systems over the next ten years. This report lays out the scientific evidence and economic case that demonstrate that, by 2030, food and land use systems can help bring climate change under control, safeguard biological diversity, ensure healthier diets for all, drastically improve food security and create more inclusive rural economies. And they can do that while reaping a societal return that is more than 15 times the related investment cost (estimated at less than 0.5 percent of global GDP) and creating new business opportunities worth up to $4.5 trillion a year by 2030.

Delivering such a transformation will be challenging but will ensure that food and land use systems play their part in delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement targets on climate change. Transformation of food and land use systems thus needs to become an urgent priority globally – for leaders in the public and private sectors, and for civil society, multilateral institutions, the research community, consumers and citizens. To support such leadership, this report from the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) proposes a reform agenda. This agenda is centred around ten critical transitions that would enable food and land use systems to provide food security and healthy diets for a global population of over nine billion by 2050, while also tackling our core climate, biodiversity, health and poverty challenges.

Conceiving of the programme as a pyramid, the transition at the apex is toward diets that are conducive to good human and planetary health. This is because the consumption patterns of more than nine billion people – what they choose to eat and how they make (or are influenced to make) those choices – are the critical factors shaping how food and land use systems evolve. Empowering consumers to make better-informed decisions that are healthier for them and for the planet ignites the whole reform agenda.

At the second level, the power of nature-based solutions is mobilised to create more productive, regenerative techniques of food production, new approaches to protecting forests and other critical ecosystems, and new ways to manage the ocean in order to protect ocean life and increase ocean protein production. All nature-based solutions have common features. They require effective legal mechanisms to protect natural capital. They require producers – farmers, fishermen and indigenous communities – to be paid transparently and fairly for the ecosystem services they provide. And they show that it is possible simultaneously to strengthen food security, tackle climate change and protect biodiversity.