Convened by EAT Foundation
AMBITION STATEMENT
The Integrated Data Systems Initiative aims to provide financial decision-makers in the public, private, and multilateral sectors with new tools to assess the landscape of risk and opportunity (wider, long-term value-creation potential) inherent in resilience-building practices, emerging business models, and standardize the practice of “good food finance”.
Current financial data systems are focused on providing information about financial returns, but are not effectively integrating earth systems data; including risk and resilience across climate, food, health, and sustainable development.
Summary
The Data Systems Working Group
Brings together experts, practitioners and GFFN members to identify relevant technological and methodological connections, to make that intelligent interaction possible.
The Data Systems Working Group is working towards solutions including:
- Development of integrated, multisystem, multiscale performance metrics, tracing financial return, food security, human health impacts, and system-level resilience, to provide an overall assessment of wider value creation;
- Survey of existing data systems, including their technological, physical and digital constraints and limitations, and which underlying technologies are in use to make each of these work;
- Practical strategies for integrating multiple non-financial data systems into financial data, based on work under areas 1 and 2;
- Evolutionary integration models—which digital, neural networking or AI approaches, make it possible to build multisystem, multiscale data platforms that not only integrate operationally distinct kinds of information, but produce accurate outputs and can evolve over time, as more is known about the meaning of specific multisystem insights;
- Identifying exemplary and theoretical/emerging business models that will exist specifically because this kind of data integration becomes possible.
The aim is to provide multidimensional decision support for financial institutions and policy-makers, to support the mainstreaming of finance for healthy, sustainable food systems.
This multidimensional approach will draw on existing and emerging standards for financial and ESG accounting and performance tracking. The resulting data systems will feed into a new financial mechanism—the Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation—which will convert such insights into real-world financial interventions.
The Integrated Data Systems Initiative will mobilize $10 million over 5 years (2023-2027) to support mobilization of at least $10 billion in catalytic finance and wider pools of investment—from public, private, multilateral, and philanthropic sources—through the Co-Investment Platform over that same period.
- 2023 – Development of a Blueprint for Good Food Finance Data Systems Integration
- 2024 – First exploratory integrations, including technologies, platforms, thematic areas, and diverse performance indicators
- 2025 – Business model development linked to exploratory integrations + further consolidated integrations
- 2026 – Initial delivery of services, including pro-bono offerings for underserved and marginal communities and value chain actors
- 2027 – Commercial data services linked to financial decision-making and to serve public agencies tracking policy and investment performance
Featured articles
Five-year sprint to transform food-related finance data
The Integrated Data Systems Initiative (IDSI) is an effort to convert dialogues around data needs and emerging innovations into real-world solutions that track food systems finance impacts across multiple dimensions. In May 2023, the IDSI was launched as a 5-year innovation sprint linked to AIM for Climate (AIM4C) Summit. The goal is to transform the way data systems inform financial decision-making—across the public, private, and multilateral sectors.
Science and Data for Healthy, Sustainable & Equitable Outcomes, at the United Nations
On Wednesday, April 12, the President of the General Assembly Csaba Kőrösi hosted a day-long Special Plenary Science Briefing for the General Assembly, in the Trusteeship Council Chamber at United Nations Headquarters in New York. Olav Kjørven shared GFFN work on Data Systems Integration and development of the Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation.
Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement invites integrated data systems
Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement envisions ‘non-market’ approaches to international cooperative climate crisis response—any way of working together to accelerate climate action that is not emissions trading. The optimal decision-support data will determine whether such cooperative arrangements operate with the ambition needed for economy-wide transformation.
Good Food Finance Network 