World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

The global food system is complex, shaped by the unique cultures, traditions, and environmental contexts of different regions. The newly launched Great Food Puzzle report introduces a groundbreaking approach to addressing the biodiversity, climate, and health crises through sustainable food systems. Rather than promoting a one-size-fits-all solution, this report helps countries identify actions that can be adapted to their specific contexts. By creating a typology of six Food Systems Types, the Great Food Puzzle reveals high-impact solutions for each group of countries, considering both environmental and socioeconomic factors.

One of the report’s most compelling findings is the unrealized potential of public education on healthy and sustainable food consumption. Raising awareness and changing behaviors are universal challenges, and some of the most innovative examples of food system transformation are already occurring within schools.

Food systems are the number one threat to nature and a major contributor to biodiversity loss. Feeding a growing world population while protecting nature and reducing GHG emissions is the imperative of our time. While the challenges are universal, solutions must be tailored to local contexts, as food systems are deeply influenced by culture, heritage, and local context. This means that what works in one place may not be effective in another.

The Great Food Puzzle series adapts solutions to the unique needs of countries by clustering countries with similar socioeconomic and environmental factors. This classification helps identify key actions to drive the shift toward healthier and more sustainable food systems—offering an opportunity for countries to learn from each other and emulate the successes of peers. The US has a similar type of food system to that of the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan.

Investor interest in financing nature-based solutions is burgeoning, but given the $711 billion funding gap, you wouldn’t know it. With over half of the global GDP reliant on nature, and the global ambition to achieve goals set in the 2016 Paris Agreement and the Global Biodiversity Framework, financing nature-based solutions is smart business. And yet, the sector struggles to secure the necessary investment to combat nature loss.

The overwhelming majority of capital allocated to climate and nature is directed toward energy, transport and infrastructure- food systems receive only 4%. Underinvestment in agriculture, especially in the transition of global food systems toward regenerative and nature-positive production practices, stands out given the sector’s profound impact on nature. Agricultural production and food systems are the main drivers of biodiversity loss, deforestation, conversion of natural habitats, and topsoil loss. They consume 70% of freshwater and generate one third of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

McDonald’s Corporation is planting trees in hedgerows on French farms, with a target of 230,000 trees by 2030. Why? This is one of the activities that companies can implement to reduce agriculture and forestry greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in their supply chains and count toward meeting their climate targets. All told, McDonald’s Corporation committed to reducing its forest, land, and agriculture emissions by 72% by 2050.

Other mitigation options for companies with food, agriculture, or forestry emissions include reducing emissions by halting deforestation and degradation, improving forest management, reducing agricultural emissions, and sequestering carbon in soil.

Businesses’ supply chains depend on climate and the services provided by nature. Companies with significant land-sector emissions are even more dependent than others, so they are strengthening their climate commitments to comprehensively include land emissions through the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). Since the SBTi began validating Forestry, Land, and Agriculture (FLAG) science-based targets last year, 83 companies have set targets to reduce their FLAG emissions and increase removals.¹

More ways companies are taking action to reduce FLAG emissions include:

Healthy diets are essential, yet only a small percentage of Americans consume the daily recommended servings of vegetables. Part of the problem is access. Millions of Americans, both in predominantly minority, urban communities, and in poorer, rural areas without major grocery chains, lack access to nutritious foods.

The problem isn’t a shortage of food. We grow plenty. But up to 40% of fresh produce grown in the US is wasted. Another real difficulty is that connections between local farmers and consumers, already broken, have split even further in recent years due to supply chain disruptions and market shifts. As a result, consumers struggle nutritionally, while small farmers struggle financially and are often forced to take off-farm jobs.

To bridge this gap, the Markets Institute at World Wildlife Fund (WWF) began to explore ways of establishing a direct connection — known as Farmers Post — between consumers and nearby farmers. We’re working with the United States Postal Service (USPS) to explore allowing consumers to have fresh produce delivered to their door. This would offer a new, and welcome, revenue stream for the USPS, which has struggled with tightening budgets in recent years, making use of its distribution expertise and its unique access to all households in the US.

Conservation efforts often face complex challenges that a single organization can't tackle alone. When a group of several major hotel chains wanted to drive measurable reduction of food waste in the hospitality sector in the U.S., for example, several companies created a pre-competitive pilot, called Hotel Kitchen, focused on food waste prevention, donation, and diversion from landfills. These types of groups, highlighted in a new WWF report, bring together diverse players in supply or value chains, from companies to NGOs and producers to researchers, to work on shared goals, which often include environmental impacts or, more directly, conservation objectives.

WWF's experience in launching and participating in such platforms suggests that no one-size-fits-all model dictates success of a precompetitive or multistakeholder group. But successful ones share some key characteristics. And there are lessons to be learned as well from initiatives that have run into roadblocks. Here are some characteristics that make them successful, illustrate pitfalls to avoid, and demonstrate how to maximize their impact.

Our food supply chain is facing critical pressures and an uncertain future. California produces more than two-thirds of the fruits and nuts grown in the US and nearly half of all its vegetables. But due to climate change, water availability, and other factors, depending on California for all that food is increasingly unsustainable.

More than a decade ago, WWF’s Markets Institute identified this growing uncertainty in domestic food production as both a challenge and an opportunity. We set out to find “the next California,” a place to build a sustainable and equitable commercial-level specialty crop industry. We settled on the Mid-Mississippi Delta (western Tennessee, northwestern Mississippi, and eastern Arkansas) as a spot that could ease the pressure on California, avoid converting natural lands to farmland elsewhere in the country, and create an equitable engine of local growth.

This is the third in a series of blog posts on carbon accounting standards. The first post provided an overarching explanation of carbon accounting and its inherent challenges. The second post examined variability in companies’ “Scope 3” emissions—that is, emissions that originate from upstream and downstream activities, which often constitute 90% or more of companies’ emissions. Here we discuss factors behind the variability of emissions across farms and regions.

The variability in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per unit of product across the agricultural sector is striking, even when comparing identical products. Understanding this variability is crucial, particularly when assessing the complexities of supply chains. This variability manifests at multiple scales—from individual farms to regions—and significantly impacts both corporate strategy and policy formulation.

At the farm level, differences in emissions can be profound, even among neighboring farms that are both practicing conventional agriculture. For instance, two farms growing the same row crops can exhibit up to a twofold difference in emissions. Similar variability exists in aquaculture, where shrimp production emissions can vary by as much as five times. These discrepancies are often due to the efficiency of input use, influenced by factors such as soil quality, farmer skill, and local weather conditions. Such variability within a farm itself can result in certain areas being more profitable than others.

When we scrape the remains of our dinner plates into the garbage or toss out food that has gone bad in our refrigerators we often think about the social or financial impact of that wasted food. But there is an important environmental connection to food loss and waste that we need to consider as well. When we waste food, the energy used to produce and transport that food also gets wasted. So, if we stop food waste, we can help combat climate change in a big way. In fact, reducing food waste can help reduce about 6-8% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Many years and another lifetime ago, I headed up the Department of Wildlife Nutrition for the St. Louis Zoo. One day I received a call from the head of a group called “Carpbusters,” who organized bow and fishing tournaments throughout the region to rid the rivers of invasive carp. Sportsmen paid fees to join the festivities, enjoyed their luck with feisty fish, and were awarded prizes for various categories of daily catch.

The lack of a proper outlet for the extracted fish, however, bothered the leaders of this conservation effort as thousands of pounds of high-quality protein rotted on the riverbanks after each weekend. Would the zoo be able to utilize carp for feeding fish-eating species? was the query. They could be delivered fresh and intact, as a free donation.

It was an excellent idea. As with most animal operations, feed costs comprised the largest portion of management, and the annual fish budget was high. If we could make a dent in the budget for feeding endangered species, while at the same time contributing to eradication of invasive species that threatened natives and their habitats, it would be a win-win for conservation.