Care about biodiversity? Push for food systems transformation

Biodiversity is poised to become this year’s biggest sustainability trend. Following the "Paris agreement for biodiversity" reached at COP15 in Montreal in December, more and more companies and investors want to understand their impact on our ecosystems and adopt efforts to protect, regenerate and sustainably manage natural resources.

That’s fantastic news — leaving carbon tunnel vision behind and instead approaching the intertwined crises of climate change and nature loss together has been long overdue. 

So now, sustainability practitioners are figuring out how to approach their new task. Why is the world’s biodiversity in such a dire state? What should we do about it? I don’t have all the answers in my back pocket, but what I do know is that we won’t be able to turn the switch on biodiversity without transforming food systems. Here’s why. 

Chomping away on our living planet

I love food — you probably do too. Eating doesn’t only mean survival, but joy, culture and connection. Unfortunately, how we’ve been feeding our own species has led to the destruction of much of the world’s native ecosystems and the extinction of many plants and animals. (By the way, our diets are also killing our own species, but I’ll hold on to that story for another article).

That’s because to produce ever more food for ever more people — who demand ever more resource-intensive products such as meat and dairy as they get wealthier — we’ve been continuously cutting down forests, plowing up savannas and draining peatlands to expand global farmlands. And we’ve been managing those acres without much concern for its native inhabitants or those in neighboring areas. 

Here’s how agriculture has affected biodiversity:

• Agriculture and aquaculture threaten 54.5 percent of the 42,109 species currently at risk of extinction, according to my calculation based on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. (This doesn’t mean that agriculture is the only threat these species are exposed to). 
• As agriculture is threatening wildlife, it’s replacing it with livestock. A stunning 96 percent of the world’s mammal biomass is livestock (this excludes humans), and 71 percent of the world’s bird biomass is farmed poultry. In other words, only 4 percent of the world’s bears, elephants, seals & co. are wild, and only 29 percent of birds live in nature. 
• To raise all these cows, pigs and chickens, grow their feed and other food for human consumption, agriculture uses half of the planet’s habitable land (defined as ice- and desert-free land). 
• We’re not stopping there. Expansion of cropping and grazing land has caused 90 percent of deforestation worldwide between 2000 and 2018. The vast majority of these forests disappeared in tropical areas, which are home to many of our planet’s biodiversity hotspots. 
• Agriculture is also responsible for 78 percent of global ocean and freshwater eutrophication — excess nutrients leaking from farms into waterways that spur uncontrollable plant and algal growth downstream. Think of algal blooms, dead zones and so forth, harming life in rivers, lakes and oceans. 

Disclaimer: Not all agricultural land is used to grow food — about 8 percent of global cropland is used for biofuels, and 2.4 percent for cotton. Agriculture is also not the only industry impacting biodiversity. Other extractive and polluting industries such as oil, gas, mining, timber and plastics play significant roles, too, alongside urbanization and other pressures. Still, as the statistics above show, food is a major area of concern. 

This has two implications: 1) If your company produces, sources or invests in agricultural products (including materials such as leather for shoes and car seats), it likely has a large biodiversity footprint. 2) That exposure comes with risk — physical, reputational and transitional. Increased land protection measures or other conservation policies are examples of nature-related transition risks. The investment bank Jefferies estimated in a recent briefing that agricultural companies’ net-present value will fall by an average of 26 percent between 2020 to 2030 if they don’t mitigate such emerging transition risks. 

Any food-adjacent company and investor would thus do itself a favor by pushing for food systems transformation. And if you’re an investor without current agricultural exposure but want to make a dent in biodiversity loss, food system solutions that alleviate biodiversity pressures present a big opportunity for you.  

How can we decouple food from nature loss? 

Despite those depressing statistics, not all is lost. Quite the opposite: We have clear and sophisticated roadmaps for a better future, including WWF’s Solving the Great Food