Food is essential to life on earth. It provides us with vital nutrients for health and wellbeing, and connects us to our families, communities, cultures, and the natural world. Today, food systems face unprecedented and accelerating challenges, but they also have enormous potential to be part of the solution, safeguarding food and nutrition security and creating more inclusive, equitable and prosperous economies and societies.
Currently, food systems contribute to and are affected by nature and biodiversity loss, climate change, and conflict. Global food and agriculture as a whole is responsible for more than one third of greenhouse gas emissions, up to 70 percent of freshwater use, and as much as 80 percent of biodiversity loss. Unsustainable food systems undermine food and nutrition security and threaten the livelihoods of frontline food systems actors.
While 30 percent of food is lost or wasted, over 900 million people are food insecure, many of whom work in agriculture, and over 3 billion cannot afford a healthy diet. As recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical tensions, and extreme weather events reveal, the vulnerabilities of our food systems to external shocks are clear.
The call to transform our food systems into one that is resilient, fair, and sustainable is echoing louder than ever.
The UN Climate Change High-Level Champions (HLCs) have collaborated with Non-State Actors – from farmers and fishers to businesses, cities, civil society, consumers and all those engaged in food systems – to develop a Non-State Actors Call to Action for Transforming Food Systems for People, Nature, and Climate.
The Call to Action mobilizes collective efforts around a shared vision of food systems that deliver significant, measurable progress for people, nature, and climate by 2030. Through this shared agenda, we aim to scale action, raise ambition, and unlock the potential of food systems as one of the main solutions for people, nature, and climate.
All of us have a role to play. Those who endorse the Call to Action will be invited to submit Statements of Action which will go towards informing a package of announcements on food systems transformation at COP28.
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