World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

Impact investing can play an important role in scaling promising solutions for conservation and food production. That’s why World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched WWF Impact, a new investing arm that makes impact-first investments into early-stage companies that align with our conservation goals of advancing more sustainable food systems.

Food production—fundamental to human survival—poses a paradoxical challenge. While agriculture produces food necessary for continued human existence, it is also a significant threat to the environment and biodiversity, fueling climate change which in turn impacts us. Nonetheless, if done properly, agriculture can also be a tool for fostering resilience in a way that restores ecosystems and nature. Today, the global food system is responsible for 27% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is a leading cause of habitat destruction, including 90% of tropical deforestation, according to WWF’s Living Planet 2024.

To both nourish a growing population while also protecting critical ecosystems and nature, new ways of producing and consuming food are needed. Historically, technology has played a fundamental role in transforming food systems. The Green Revolution is one such example, where new breakthroughs in genetic improvement and crop productivity dramatically boosted yields. Today, a new type of agriculture revolution is needed—one which better stewards and respects the planet and does so in a sustainable way. Technologies and innovative business models can be an important part of this transition, providing promising solutions for shifting society towards a more nature-positive food system and advancing WWF’s conservation mission. However, there is often a lack of funding and resources to enable the growth of these promising business models. That is where impact investing comes in—impact-first financing that deploys capital to generate both positive social and environmental outcomes for people and planet.

In the last decade, impact investing has blossomed in sectors like health, education, climate, and gender. A variety of actors are entering this space, from venture capital funds and multinational development banks to charitable organizations like WWF which use investments to advance their missions. Overall, it is estimated that the size of the impact investing field reached $1.57 trillion USD in 2024, growing with a 21% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) since 2019. Impact investors strongly integrate impact into their operations and have an impact-driven investment thesis, in which they only make investments in companies and sectors that further their impact-strategy. The figure below shows where impact investors fall along the “impact-returns” spectrum. Impact funds make investments that prioritize an “impact return” over economic return. This is where WWF Impact operates. We use patient capital to make investments that are economically sustainable, maximize impact, and further WWF’s conservation objectives and charitable mission.

Leading companies know that addressing plastic pollution is important for their business continuity, resilience, and license to operate, and it's also the right thing to do. Companies are in many different places on their sustainability journey, and need support on how to act, advocate, and invest towards meaningful, measurable impact.

Annual reporting through ReSource: Plastic, as outlined in this year’s Transparent report, has helped inform many companies’ mitigation strategies, raised their level of ambition, and pushed companies to improve their data collection processes and disclose more accurately and comprehensively.

The major takeaways from the past five years of ReSource: Plastic reporting include:

A couple of years ago, if you drank a bottle of iced tea in Ocean County, New Jersey, it would have been the rare polypropylene item that even had a chance of being recycled. That's because the system was relying on one of the few workers at the county's recycling center to easily recognize and capture polypropylene packaging by hand. The rest—yogurt tubs, takeout containers, and other polypropylene packaging—often ended up at the landfill.

While that scenario is one of a number facilities face, sortation at a facility is only one part of a much larger opportunity for polypropylene recycling. The US generates about two billion pounds of polypropylene waste annually and currently only recycles 8%. Capturing this material requires building out stronger domestic supply chains supported by increased collection and sortation capabilities, and ensuring end markets can repurpose the post-consumer material for use in new products.

At The Recycling Partnership (TRP), we are working to establish and expand such supply chains. The investment needed to do that is large, but so are the prospective returns: Over five years, $17 billion applied to proven recycling solutions would deliver an estimated $30.8 billion in economic benefits that extend over a decade.

While beef production is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and has the greatest average global emissions intensity per kilogram of meats, there are also opportunities for the beef system, including beef and feed producers, to improve their carbon footprint. Improving our ability to know where and how beef is produced and who along the value chain – from farm to retail -- is playing a part in incentivizing and implementing carbon footprint improvements can help better recognize and financially reward those making climate benefits happen. A new project is working to make this transparency and accountability happen.

World Wildlife Fund, in collaboration with FAI Farms and Standard Soil, have been awarded a two-year USDA Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) titled Traceable Beef for Climate and Conservation. In July, USDA announced it would invest $90 million in 53 CIG projects. 

This two-year USDA CIG will develop and test an innovative framework that measures, tracks and allocates verified carbon outcomes across full beef value chains and validate the methodology through targeted implementation with producers. The primary scope includes Iowa and Oklahoma, but we are open to considering other producers if they meet the criteria.

Understanding the Scale of Plastic Pollution

By now, most people are aware that plastic pollution has become a crisis, devastating ecosystems and communities around the globe. That’s because the evidence is all around us in plain view – littering roadsides, overflowing from trash cans, and washing up on beaches. However, while we may know that plastic pollution is pervasive, it is hard to fully comprehend the monumental scale of the problem when so much more of it is out of our sight, from the plastic waste we export to developing countries to the plastic floating in remote parts of the ocean or breaking down into microplastics.

If you don’t understand the scale of a problem, how can you effectively take steps to address it? How can you know what is working and what is not? That’s where data collection comes in.

And more specifically, the need to make sure that the data we are using to understand plastic pollution are harmonized across companies, industries, and even countries – otherwise we will never fully comprehend what we are up against or what solutions are most impactful.

When it comes to adapting to climate change, the private sector seems to be spinning its wheels. They remain focused solely on hardening their business to climate impacts, when they should be addressing the root causes of climate vulnerability, such as social inequality and nature loss. Too many companies still operate as they did 30 years ago, with a myopic view of what risk entails and a singular focus on achieving short-term profit. If they can muster a broader, longer-term vision, companies could benefit from greater investment in a more holistic and nature-friendly approach to business.

It was meant to be the breakthrough moment in the global fight against plastic pollution. After two years of negotiation and countless hours of work from hundreds of people around the world, the UN process to adopt a global treaty against plastic pollution would finally conclude last week. But after a roller coaster of a week, we left disappointed.

How can wood furniture help ensure forests remain standing? Using wood from responsibly managed forests actually can help keep forests healthy for generations to come. Forests managed under rigorous environmental and social criteria can generate income while allowing forests to regenerate naturally, so they continue to provide goods and services that benefit people, wildlife, and climate. This market incentive helps keep forests from being degraded or cleared for agriculture or other uses. So, companies that offer wood products in the marketplace have a crucial role to play in addressing the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss through their responsible sourcing decisions.

Without fanfare, the global food system has reached peak land. Since 2000, the amount of land used for food production — both arable land for crops and pasture for livestock — has declined. While that seems to be good news for the environment, we are also still expanding food production into some areas at the expense of forests, grasslands, and wetlands.

Remarkably, since the amount of land that we farm began to decline, we have produced significantly more food. In fact, it is because we can meet global food needs using less land that we are able to decouple agricultural land use from food production. This trend can go much further and faster. Recognizing that today is Food, Agriculture, and Water Day at COP29, here is a way to make that happen.