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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

For most of us, Thanksgiving is all about the food. And for those looking to have a more environmentally-friendly Thanksgiving this year, the number one thing we can do is take steps to value the food we’re serving. This starts with us recognizing all of the resources that go into producing our Thanksgiving meal (long before we purchase our ingredients at the supermarket), and it ends with us doing our part to make sure none of it goes to waste.