Agroecology to drive high-value sustainable development

As the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference enters the closing days, many of the highest-value areas of climate-related investment and transformation remain largely untapped by the mainstream economy. While the negotiations in Belém, at the edge of the Amazon region, have advanced new initiatives for sharing science insights and investing in conservation, it is important that we not overlook the biggest opportunity for shifting destructive spending to value-building resilience priorities.

In 2021, to mark the start of the United Nations a Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, we wrote:

Nature is a continuum. If we look at the local details of what we call “the climate system”, this continuum becomes visible: mountain glaciers shed water into rivers and streams, which fan out across the landscape, and eventually run to the ocean. 

Human societies tend to be organized around watersheds. When we talk about the cryosphere, we not only talk about cold, reflective places that anchor climate patterns; we are also talking about the water that sustains life and determines the health of land-based and marine ecosystems.

Regenerative and agroecological food production systems can support ecosystem restoration and the diversification of rural, front-line, and otherwise vulnerable local economies. There are four core facts that policy-makers, industrial actors, and investors, need to keep in mind, to understand the transformational value of Nature-rebuilding food systems investments: 

1. The hidden costs generated by unsustainable and unhealthy food systems practices exceed $15 trillion per year. $40 billion is being wasted every day—value we cannot afford to do without, as we work to reduce risk and build resilience in the face of worsening climate change.
2. Climate change and Nature loss, which reinforce and accelerate each other, make it harder to produce food efficiently and reliably, creating ripple effects that draw on public budgets and pose worsening risks of political and economic instability.
3. Because so much of the hidden cost of food systems is not the direct expenditure itself, there is immense opportunity for bringing new capital into food value chains, to improve standards, practices, outcomes, and livelihoods.
4. Restoring ecosystems and building soil biomass are climate services that add an additional layer of value on top of standard food production methods; that can translate into an additional stream of revenue which need not be paid by the consumer.

In other words, it is possible to expand pools of capital going into food systems, improve returns on investment, increase incomes throughout the value chain, and stabilize food prices, while saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars per year. Importantly, many of the first order benefits will not be in the food products themselves, but in the health and resilience of Nature and in human health and wellbeing. 

This is essential to ramping up climate-resilient development, because when value is added across society, across sectors and geographies— and in ways that reduce fiscal strain and free up public budgets to invest for long-term value—the result is an organic expansion of everyday economic activity linked to those better standards, practices, and outcomes. 

Realigning destructive capital, which is generating massive hidden costs, can ensure the investments in question are better able to sustain financial returns and create the foundation for sustainable, shared prosperity. Local and regional jurisdictions can maximize the development ROI by calibrating budgets to support benefits to Nature, communities, health, and livelihoods.

The Sustainable Development Goals provide an important landscape of value considerations to reviewing this destructive vs. productive capital question. The health of Nature and ecosystems is linked to all 17 Goals, as is human health. Investing to deliver some of these universal human needs while also delivering a financial return is the most sensible thing anyone in government or business could do.

For negotiators in Belém, it is worth considering ways to free up this capital and create the climate-resilient development opportunity, as soon and as widely as possible. We reiterate here our list of food forward climate action standards that might be used to mobilize food systems finance at scale: 

• Align subsidies, incentives, and support programs to reduce harm to Nature, and to drive adoption of regenerative and agroecological practices.
• Coordinate investments in supporting sectors, including infrastructure, to maximize the sustainable food systems opportunity, throughout the value chain.
• Reward land stewards and food producers who restore and sustain natural systems and provide climate services.
• Invest in practical insight-sharing, science translation efforts, and SMEs that enhance sustainable food systems capacity, especially for vulnerable communties.
• Use fiscal efficiency metrics to account for health impacts and costs, and to integrate food systems investment priorities into mitigation, adaptation and resilience, loss and damage, and other climate-related investment priorities.
• Establish watershed-wide incentives for cooperative problem-solving and for agroecological and regenerative land use practices.

Brazil’s commitment to sustainably manage 100% of its national waters by 2030—3.68 million square kilometers—is an important step toward unlocking watershed resilience capital. The World Resources Institute notes the far-reaching implications: 

Brazil’s ocean area is the tenth largest in the world, and boasts the longest coastline in South America. Its waters underpin an ocean economy that contributes roughly 19% of Brazil’s GDP, supports 3.5 million jobs in fisheries and aquaculture and drives around 70% of national tourism revenue.

It makes sense to integrate these actions into national decarbonization and adaptation plans (NDCs and NAPs). It also makes sense to work with multilateral institutions to support vulnerability-sensitive debt relief. Cooperation between agencies and across sectors and landscapes can link climate and food goals to ecosystem restoration and to the work of diversifying local economies.

Multilevel climate governance is required to get the best outcomes across the board—for communities, for enterprise, for investors, for national climate action, and for overall global climate risk reduction and resilience-building. The Global Mutirão—the value-building cooperative climate crisis response—needs more emergence efforts with deeper local roots, rapid scaling, and intentional investment in climate, Nature, and health co-benefits.