4.3.3.6 Food system tipping points have important feedbacks for protecting nature

Together, widespread adoption of sustainable diets, the reduction of food loss and waste, and the sustainable use of land can work in synergy with one another to reduce GHG emissions, especially methane, and meet SDG targets for food security and sustainable livelihoods (Figure 4.3.9). Critically, they also have powerful synergies for protecting nature, including critically vulnerable carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots like the Amazon.  

Both reducing food loss and waste and changing towards planetary health diets can significantly reduce the global land area required for food production, despite growing populations, and open opportunities for nature recovery, including land-based CO₂ removal (Powell and Lenton, 2012; Meldrum et al, 2023). This could help reduce focus on maximising yields in intensive agriculture, and open opportunities to shift farming practice through incentives for diversifying farm business models to include ecosystem service provision, with the aim of restoring ecological health and function to agrifood systems.

Growing markets for natural capital and payments for ecosystem services, supported by strong policy and incentive frameworks to support agro-ecological farming and nature-based solutions, can make alternative models of land-management economically viable by creating economies of scale, and weaken economic incentives for environmentally degrading practices, including intensive livestock production. The rapid growth in voluntary carbon markets globally (close to US$1bn in 2021) demonstrates this potential, and these and other natural capital markets are seen as key pathways for directing climate finance, with significant recent commitments made by the EU (EU Parliament, 2023) and African leaders (African Union, 2023). Recently, important critiques have been made of the transparency and effectiveness of credits for avoided emissions (e.g. West et al., 2023), and warnings of the risks of inappropriate (e.g. tree planting in African grasslands) (Bond et al., 2019) or poorly implemented carbon removal initiatives. These are undermining confidence in carbon markets and present a critical incentive for the evolution of more robust, transparent and accountable mechanisms to direct finance to appropriate solutions. Key to this is also ensuring benefits from these markets are accessible to communities and Indigenous peoples, who are key to ensuring sustainable land use transitions in much of the world. Reducing deforestation and supporting regeneration of natural vegetation can reduce annual net GHG emissions by more than 5GtCO2e by 2030, and more than 8GtCO2e by 2050, while contributing to halting and reversing biodiversity decline, and all while delivering a possible net economic gain of US$895bn per year by 2030, and US$1.3tn per year by 2050 (The Food and Land Use Coalition, 2021). 

Shifts in values and norms which can accelerate tipping towards planetary health diets are also likely to be tightly linked, and therefore mutually reinforcing, to those which build demand for ‘deforestation-free’ products or which can demonstrate strong credentials for supporting conservation and Indigenous rights. These shifts can be accelerated by development of robust and transparent mechanisms for verifying and labelling provenance, and further strengthened by public and private-sector commitments to deforestation-free supply chains (The Food and Land Use Coalition, 2021).