Food Tank just returned from an inspiring day of discussions at Food Tank’s first Annual London Climate Action Week Summit, held in partnership with Google Cloud and Nomad Foods, in collaboration with Compass Group, Oatly, and the Sustainable Food Trust, and advised by the Center for Food Policy at City, University of London.
I’ll start by sharing one of my favorite lines of the day: Just crying about climate change is not enough.
Geoffrey Hawtin, Executive Board Member for the Crop Trust and the recipient of the 2024 World Food Prize, points out that the world’s poorest countries have been disproportionately impacted by climate change, but now the Global North is beginning to see significant impacts too: Parts of Asia, Europe, Central America, and the United States are all currently experiencing record-breaking heat waves.
“Maybe that’s going to be enough to wake people up,” says Hawtin. Wake people up to go beyond far-off commitments and take more ambitious, concrete action.
Tackling climate change requires first understanding that food production and the environment cannot be treated separately—this has been one of the key arguments of The Right Honorable the Lord Deben, who chaired the UK Government’s Committee on Climate Change for over a decade.
“We have to look at everything through the lens of climate change…Nothing we do is unconnected with solving this problem,” says Lord Deben.
And that includes the food we eat every day—how it is grown, transported, stored, and disposed of.
We need more consumers demanding food systems change by purchasing sustainable food options. Adele Jones, Executive Director of The Sustainable Food Trust, says that “we have to make it super easy and transparent” for consumers to make informed, holistic decisions.
And sometimes small changes can make a surprising impact: Nomad Foods’ recent 18-month-long study found that storing your frozen food at -15°C instead of the industry standard of -18°C can reduce freezer energy consumption by between 10 and 11 percent without impacting food safety or quality.
And we have roadmaps, including one from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, to help us guide us in food systems transformation.
But roadmaps alone aren’t enough.
“We don’t have enough ambition in how we tackle climate change,” says Zitouni Ould-Dada, Senior Advisor at FAIRR.
Ould-Dada calls for countries to make more ambitious and specific NDCs (national climate action plans), ones that include a concrete plan to transition to sustainable and resilient food systems. There must be clear pathways including targets, milestones, and actions across sectors.
And the investment community needs to step up to the plate: Food systems receive just over 4 percent of total public climate finance, lagging far behind energy and transport. “The food system can’t change overnight, but the flow of finance can,” says Dharshan Wignarajah, UK Director of the Climate Policy Initiative.
There is a lack of awareness among financiers, both about the importance of food and agriculture and the complexities of its solutions: “Finance is complicated. It goes to where it’s easiest to deploy,” says Wignarajah.
“We need to change the nature of the conversation,” says Jack Bobo, Director of the Food Systems Institute at the University of Nottingham. “How we talk about it is the single biggest barrier” to connecting investors to these issues.
The climate conversation often centers heavily on carbon. But the pandemic showed us the need for resilient supply chains, and nature-friendly farming has benefits that go beyond reducing carbon.
We need to avoid carbon tunnel vision, says Julia Collins, Founder and CEO of Planet FWD.
And young people who are shifting the conversation and working toward food systems transformation around the world, and London Climate Action Week was no exception. Young people taking action today “are going to be the lifeline,” says Asma Khan, Celebrity Chef, British Restaurateur, and Owner of Darjeeling Express.
One point repeated throughout our Summit is the power of collaboration and building relationships. It will take all of us—farmers, businesses, policymakers, investors, researchers, advocates, and eaters—to come together. And that means that we have to break down siloes and build trust between one another, so that we can work together and leverage our collective expertise to achieve what I like to think of as mass incremental change.
It was an inspiring summit highlighting the solutions and opportunities that were shared with us in London, the networks and collaborations that are so fundamental to food systems change.
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Photo courtesy of Shai Dolev
