World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

Our food systems are pushing the planet to its limits, while hundreds of millions go hungry and billions lack access to healthy diets. To sustain both people and the planet, a systems-wide transformation across land and sea is essential.

For the past decade, World Wildlife Fund has worked closely with the Seafood Task Force (STF) — the only global trade association uniting the world's largest retailers, seafood brands, and their partners — to enhance supply chain oversight and drive continuous improvement from vessel to plate. STF is the first pre-competitive seafood platform to institutionalize conversion-free shrimp, marking a major milestone in its journey.

Plastic waste is choking our planet. It’s in our air, water, and soil—threatening both wildlife and communities. A crisis of this magnitude warrants an equally bold response. To meet this challenge head on, we’re excited to announce the launch of Plastic Reboot, a systemic, global solution to tackle plastic pollution at its root.

Together, we’re making progress in collecting and analyzing data on food waste across our food system, giving us a clearer picture of its scale, causes, and impacts on our planet, communities, and wallets. Measuring food waste enables us to manage it and know how to respond; but changing habits is hard, and without the right setup to enable and empower each of us to act, reducing food waste can feel like another item on our to-do list in our already busy days.

That’s where the power of community and the most recent Food Waste Prevention Week (FWPW) comes in. What started as a passionate initiative in Florida has grown into a nationwide movement driven by dedicated partners and leaders across all 50 states. With online resources, events, K-12 school opportunities, and more hosted during the week of April 7-13th, each year FWPW makes food waste reduction accessible and easy for everyone—at home, in schools, offices, restaurants, and grocery stores.

Throughout my career, I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of literally saving species—through food. As a specialist in comparative animal nutrition, I’ve spent decades working at the intersection of wildlife biology and food systems. The principles I’ve learned in conservation nutrition are now informing global efforts to make animal agriculture more sustainable. Whether saving endangered ferrets or feeding livestock with less environmental impact, the core message remains: nutrition matters, from the ground up.

The food we eat has an interconnected story to tell, more than just what our taste buds enjoy. From production to distribution to preparation and beyond, our food goes on a journey with potential environmental impacts along the way. Long before food ends up on our plates, the production of it uses 40% of all habitable land, accounts for 70% of water use and is responsible for over a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, according to WWF’s 2024 Living Planet Report.

The good news is that the transformation of our food systems is possible. Focusing production on nature-positive solutions can help provide enough food for everyone, while reducing the impacts to nature and the wildlife that depend on healthy ecosystems. From governments to corporations, and even individuals - we all have a role to play. WWF’s collaboration with Kroger is an example of how companies can contribute to the health of our planet by supporting meaningful conservation efforts that benefit both nature and business.

Recently members of the WWF Freshwater team had the opportunity to visit some of the conservation project sites that Reckitt's brand Finish Dishwashing is helping to fund in New Mexico, along the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo. WWF and Finish’s partnership supports the river’s restoration and replenishment through the funding of four projects, aimed at restoring water flows to one of America’s most important and endangered rivers. Local conservation organizations including Trout Unlimited, Rio Grande Return, Defenders of Wildlife, and The Rio Grande Joint Venture are implementing the four projects with support from WWF. Through the funding of the project, Finish is contributing to conservation efforts that will have a lasting positive impact on the river and the species and people it supports.

My name is Rogue, and I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to introduce myself and my passions in this essay. I’m currently a senior attending Bioscience High School. Some of my hobbies include hiking, gardening (though I’m not that good at it), and learning!

Nature is our most valuable resource, and we all have a role to play in protecting it. From providing clean air and clean water to protecting our food systems and ecosystems, nature works hard for us. Let’s give thanks to nature this Earth Month with actions big and small that can help the planet.

Where to begin? Whether you’re interested in individual- or corporate-level actions, or something in between, we have put together a list of key dates and ideas to guide the way. Small actions can add up to big benefits for our planet. You’ve got this.

Today is Pi Day, the one day each year when math nerds everywhere trade their calculators for forks and celebrate pi the tastiest way possible with actual pie. As a math nerd whose work encompasses food and the environment, I’ve decided to mark the occasion by calculating the environmental footprint of a single slice of key lime pie. Maybe two slices… purely in the name of science, of course.

You probably know that the carbon footprint of different products varies – the footprint of beef, for example, tends to be higher than that of tomatoes. But where do those numbers come from? To learn how carbon footprints are calculated, let’s take a deep dive inside one calculator that WWF devised with the Global Salmon Initiative (GSI). This calculator is being used by GSI member companies to track their progress towards an ambitious benchmark we call “The Salmon of 2030” and to accelerate mitigation efforts through shared knowledge. The core calculator was developed by Blonk Consultants and IDH.