Food accounts for 13% of cities’ carbon emissions every year. But a small league of C40 Good Food Cities, from New York to Quezon City, is hoping to change that.
BROOKLYN, New York –
Little about the culinary center serving New York’s Health + Hospitals agency evokes a home kitchen. Hair-netted cooks mix the ingredients for salsa verde in white bins the size of babies’ bathtubs. A row of combi ovens, gleaming and tall, roast hundreds of sweet plantains at a time. Nearby, a 200-gallon water bath chills reduced-oxygen packets of just-steamed yellow-and-white “sunshine” rice, preserving their freshness.
And yet, the 15,000 meals prepared daily inside this yellow brick building in Brooklyn to supply New York City’s 11 public hospitals and four nursing homes are meant to provide the same succor as a get-well bowl of homemade soup lovingly proffered by Mom on a sick day home from school. When plotting out menus, “What we wanted to do was say, what comfort foods would our patients enjoy?” says the center’s corporate chef, Philip DeMaiolo, who gets a little wistful when he remembers the pastina in brodo his mother used to cook him when he had a cold. “They’re lying in a bed, they don’t choose when the nurse comes in to take blood or measure their blood pressure,” he says. “We want them to at least be satisfied with what they’ve chosen to eat.”
Increasingly over the last two years, New York’s hospital patients are choosing some of the 25 plant-based meals DeMaiolo and his staff of 30 chefs and cooks have painstakingly devised. And it’s not just about replicating that home cooked meal. Rather, it’s part of a years-long calculated effort to reduce New York City’s food-based carbon footprint by 33 percent by 2030. Behind that goal is a nonprofit network of 96 global mayors called C40 Cities (so named back in 2006 when membership was just 40 cities). C40’s mayors commit to a science-based approach to limiting global heating while building healthy, equitable, resilient communities. Under that broader umbrella is the 55-city-strong Food Systems Network, which work together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by improving food policies. A smaller subset of those 55 are part of C40’s Good Food Cities Accelerator program
What does it mean to be a Good Food City?
To date, sixteen cities, including Copenhagen, Milan, Quezon City, Seoul, and New York, have joined the Accelerator. With urban populations consuming 70 percent of the world’s food, and animal-centric diets responsible for as much as 20 percent of a city’s total carbon emissions, Accelerator mayors recognize they can make a transformative change by tackling issues around what we eat. They’ve signed a pledge to improve our planet’s health by procuring and promoting more plant-based foods, using what’s known as the Planetary Health Diet devised by the EAT-Lancet Commission as a baseline. In this metric, meat and dairy take up a much smaller portion of a plate than perhaps has been traditional in some cultures. Cities also agree to cut their food waste in half from a 2015 baseline. In the process, they aim to improve the health and wellbeing of their most vulnerable residents. “The kind of programs that have most success within cities, and have been replicated most around the globe, are the ones that hit the climate, health, and inequity angles at the same time,” says Stefania Amato, C40’s head of food strategy.
As a requirement to be a member, C40 cities “have written climate action plans that address how they’re going to achieve a 1.5-degree C future,” explains Zachary Tofias, C40’s director of food and waste. Accelerator cities develop strategies with residents, businesses, and public institutions to make plant-based eating and reduced food waste more achievable for everyone. Some have amped up their composting efforts and compelled their agencies to cut back on the purchase of animal-sourced products, which can account for 75 percent of a city’s food-based emissions. They report their progress every year, using a data framework devised by the Carbon Disclosure Project. Finally, C40 checks this data to ensure cities have decreased the volume of the highest-emitting food groups in their purchasing, and reports are publicly shared.
Since different cities have different procurement policies and different mayoral priorities, there’s variation in strategy among Accelerator signatories. The city of Lima has helped build over 1,800 “bio-gardens” to make hyper-local produce available to its citizens. Since 2008, New York has required its 11 agencies to serve a plant protein for lunch and dinner at least once a week. But its food- based efforts in schools and hospitals—the largest public municipal systems of their kind in the U.S., each serving around one million students or patients per year—are where it has so far shined.
New York City children are now served culturally relevant, plant-based meals cooked from scratch every Friday, with more plant-powered options offered throughout the week; they also learn about the importance of healthy diets through school garden programs and visits to farmers’ markets. “Changing behaviors—that’s what this work is all about,” says Kate MacKenzie, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy.
At Health + Hospitals, plant-based meals are offered as the primary option, and about 50 percent of in-patients are now opting for these plant-based meals during their stay—significantly more than in 2021, when the agency’s plant-centric initiative began in earnest. In 2023 alone, Health + Hospitals served more than 783,000 plant-based meals. Though there were previously vegetable-based options on the menu, says DeMaiolo, “It’s very easy to steam vegetables and call it plant based. But the thing is, people don’t enjoy them, and then you’re wasting food.” He says patient education has been a big part of the program’s success.
Every day, lunch and dinner menus feature a plant-based chef’s special and a plant-based alternative. Animal-sourced dishes turn up further down the menu. That daily special could be Puerto Rican sancocho, where plantains, garbanzos, pumpkin, and corn replace pork in a vegetable broth; or red curry tofu; or jerk mushrooms with collard greens and beans. “It’s a very diverse, cultural-type menu,” DeMaiolo says. That too is by design. Over 60 percent of patients served at NYC’s public hospitals are Hispanic or Latinx, 15 percent are Black, about six percent are Asian. Each patient has deeply held and diverse memories of what comfort food looks, smells, and tastes like to them.
Patients are visited by food service associates who break down what’s on offer. “They’ll go, ‘Mrs. Smith, tomorrow’s chef’s special is mushroom stroganoff over rotelli pasta,’ and they’ll explain exactly what’s in it to you,” says DeMaiolo. After the meal, the associate returns to the patient for feedback. “If a new dish is too spicy, I can turn that spice down. Then I’ll run it as a special again, see if that improves its rating,” says DeMaiolo. He considers any dish that scores 80 percent approval a homerun and adds it to the rotation.
This sort of innovation, attention to small details, and getting things just right befits a program in a city that was one of the founders of C40 back in 2006. “They’ve been a leader in a wide variety of the activities that we’ve undertaken,” says Tofias. This is the sort of tenacity necessary to participate in the organization, since C40’s approach is not to do the projects themselves, but rather to “support the sharing of good ideas that can help raise ambition and give confidence to mayors that they’re on the right track,” says Tofias. With a 90 percent overall approval rating for the plant-based meals New York’s Health + Hospitals are serving, and with even more plant-based meals about to come on the menu in other agencies, the city is well on track.
Mangrove ecosystems provide community livelihoods, function as biodiversity hotspots, and help mitigate the effects of climate change, but efforts to protect them have been patchy and localized. A few organizations have banded together to change that.
MARISMAS NACIONALES
Oscar González Díaz takes a closer look at the mangroves surrounding a small patch of earth and vegetation, one of few remaining in this part of the lagoon. The leaves are sparse, but they will regenerate once the rains pick up and increase the ratio of freshwater to saltwater in the Chumbeño lagoon, connected to the ocean on Mexico’s Pacific coast.
A fisherman from Francisco Villa, one of the villages along the lagoon, González Díaz is also a community monitor in this area of the Marismas Nacionales Nayarit biosphere reserve. The protected area is home to 15-20 percent of Mexico’s mangroves, and local monitors have been working in tandem with governmental authorities and with support from conservation groups to monitor, protect, and restore them.
“This is natural restoration. More than 40 of us participated,” says González Díaz, standing barefoot in the muddy patch of greenery surrounded by dead mangrove trunks protruding from the lagoon surface. “It was a much taller forest than what is left.”
The Marismas Nacionales Nayarit Biosphere Reserve in the state of Nayarit is a vast area of interconnected mangrove forests, lagoons, wetlands, and intertidal zones. Covering more than 1,300 square kilometers (800 square miles), it is larger than more than a third of national parks in the United States and United Kingdom. The biosphere reserve provides habitat for wildlife, including jaguars and more than 250 bird species, and the mangroves are vital for the fishing that drives community economies.
“It is a reservoir of life,” says González Díaz. “A key role of the mangroves is as an incubator for shrimp. Everything is protected in the roots,” he says back on the shore, where some fishermen are taking advantage of downtime during the seasonal shrimp fishing ban to repair their nets.
In tropical and subtropical countries around the world, mangrove ecosystems provide community livelihoods, function as biodiversity hotspots, and help mitigate the effects of climate change. An understanding of their importance has been growing over the decades, but research and conservation efforts were often disconnected or localized. Five years ago, a few organizations banded together to try to change that.
The Global Mangrove Alliance was launched in 2018 by coordinating members Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Wetlands International, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and the World Wildlife Fund with the goal of reversing mangrove loss and increasing mangrove habitat. An estimated 50 percent of the world’s mangroves have been lost in as many years, with devastating impacts on food sovereignty and climate change resilience, but the rate of loss has been slowing down substantially.
Membership in the alliance quickly began to grow, and it comprises more than 25 national and international non-governmental organizations, foundations, and scientific research institutions on five continents.
“We were just seeing a lot of mangrove efforts fail,” says Emily Landis, Climate and Ocean lead at The Nature Conservancy. “It seemed that no one was learning from each other. We were duplicating efforts. We weren’t achieving scale. It was just a general sense of, we can do better, and we should be doing better, in talking to each other and working on this together.”
The organizations started out taking stock of the situation, with dialogue to sort out who was doing what where, what was working, and what was not. Member groups were already working on initiatives in tandem with their own constellations of partners, from rural fishing cooperatives to NASA. The alliance began setting up working groups at the global level and now also national chapters on the ground to address different facets of their overarching goals of halting mangrove loss and implementing science-based restoration with community engagement.
“We’ve continued to grow as the challenges, and the solutions have been identified,” says Landis. “The main priorities that we have are a policy, a science, and a communication focus.”
There are roughly 70 species of mangrove trees and shrubs across tropical and subtropical regions of the world, growing in intertidal zones where saltwater and freshwater mix. Their raised root systems provide food and shelter for juvenile shrimp, shellfish, fish, and many other animals, acting as nurseries for species that contribute both to local livelihoods and to the global seafood supply. More than four million people from Indigenous and other local communities rely directly on mangroves for small-scale fishing activities.
Mangrove forests form natural buffers where the land meets the sea, mitigating storm surges, and winds, which reduces risks of flooding and other damages. They also have a tremendous capacity to convert carbon dioxide into organic carbon, stored both in the trees and shrubs and especially in the sediment-rich soil in which they grow. Scientific studies over the past five years have found that mangrove forests sequester up to five times as much carbon as inland tropical forests.
“Of all the world’s ecosystems, mangroves are the most effective per unit area at trapping and storing carbon,” the Global Mangrove Alliance noted in its first State of the World’s Mangroves report, launched last year. “In the face of accelerating climate change, mangroves are particularly important contributors to ecosystem-based adaptation,” the report highlighted.
The converse is also true, though: per area, the destruction of mangroves can be a particularly important contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The majority of that destruction is due to human activity, and research shows that aquaculture and agriculture—notably the pond-based shrimp farming and oil palm industries—are the top cause, according to studies. Deforestation and urbanization are also contributors. So is climate change. While mangroves naturally alleviate some climate change impacts, human activity can act as stressors, weakening the capacity of mangrove forests to handle tropical storms and rising sea levels.
There is growing recognition in the international community of the importance of mangroves and other coastal ecosystems, and how they are interconnected with communities, climate change, and food systems. In 2015, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, established July 26 as the International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem. In 2019, the UN General Assembly proclaimed 2021-2030 the UN Decade on Ecological Restoration and marine and coastal ecosystems are part and parcel of the call to action.
Coastal ecosystem restoration, traditional livelihoods, and climate change were also part of the discussions at the first annual and in-person Ocean and Climate Dialogue, held this past June in Germany to discuss how to strengthen ocean-based action in the context of climate change and UN programs and mandates. The initiative grew out of the UN Climate Change Conference in 2019, and a UN secretariat will present a summary of the dialogue at the next conference, COP27, in November. The Global Mangrove Alliance team has been working closely with other coalitions on advocacy related to climate change negotiations.
“We’re working on stronger language for oceans, which obviously then benefits mangroves and having mangroves be part of the climate solution both for mitigation and for adaptation. And this will of course, then also trickle down to the country level because all of these are country-level commitments, but as a whole, it’s a global solution,” says Landis.
“From the policy side, there’s a lot that can still be done,” she says. “There’s also a lot of interest right now in innovative financing around mangrove systems.”
The Global Mangrove Alliance is examining the issue of financing in partnership with a World Economic Forum mangrove working group. Carbon offsets have been around for decades but have largely focused on inland forest protection and replanting. Corporations, institutions, and even individuals can fund certified initiatives that reduce or prevent carbon dioxide emissions to offset their own carbon footprints. There is now growing interest in what has been dubbed Blue Carbon, with credits for the protection and restoration of seagrasses, tidal marshes, and mangroves.
For Kevin Loza Pérez, the connection between mangroves and climate change is much more tangible. He is the treasurer of Ostricamichin, a community cooperative farming oysters in mangrove-lined waterways near the southern edge of the Marismas Nacionales Nayarit biosphere reserve in Mexico. The mangroves are key to livelihoods in the Boca de Camichin village, where practically everyone lives from fishing and oyster farming, and they also protect those livelihoods from hurricanes, which have been increasing in frequency and intensity with climate change.
Ostricamichin members use the hanging raft method, with empty half shells strung on ropes hanging from cross-beams on floating rafts. They anchor their rafts in one area while oyster larvae attach to the old shells and then move their rafts to another area while the new oysters grow. But when hurricanes and storms are approaching, as well as in the off-season after harvest, they anchor and affix their rafts in channels within the mangrove forest for shelter.
“Mangroves serve as protection,” says Loza Pérez, doing three things at once in a little Ostricamichin office along the coconut palm-lined shore, where the cooperative will sort and weigh the daily harvest around dusk. For now, oyster farmers are still heading out to tend to their raft systems throughout the day, slowing their boats to a crawl when they approach farming areas.
“We have done clean-up work in the mangroves and estuaries,” says Loza Pérez, adding that cooperative members have successfully established regulations and conservation policies in their general assemblies, with fines and other consequences to deter deforestation and littering.
Now 23, Loza Pérez has taken part in oyster farming for a decade, starting out by helping his father. Ever since he was a young child, his grandfather would talk about his dream for the oyster farming community: industrial smoker ovens. As one of the cooperative board members, Loza Pérez has been able to help fulfill that dream. Ostricamichin recently bought two smoker ovens, which will greatly increase the value of part of the local annual harvest, which hit 1,400 metric tons last year. Loza Pérez now has a new dream the cooperative has been working at: certification for export.
Value-added production and sustainable fishing practices have been a priority for some Global Mangrove Alliance members working with local communities on the ground, while others have focused on scientific research, conservation, restoration, or policy. The alliance works closely with Global Mangrove Watch, an open-access online platform with remote-sensing data mapping that can help local governments and groups monitor mangrove habitat and loss. The idea has always been to also coordinate on the ground between members at the local level.
“When we started the alliance we had to come up with a global goal in terms of the restoration and keeping existing mangroves standing, but it took time with all of these partnerships,” says Karen Douthwaite, Lead Ocean Specialist at the World Wildlife Fund.
The Global Mangrove Alliance has been supporting regional program development with community groups, NGOs, governments, and businesses in tropical and subtropical regions around the world. Some alliance members have also been engaged in other regional efforts, such as the Save Our Mangroves Now project in the Western Indian Ocean region.
“That has really been aimed at international policy engagement but also bringing together four of the countries of the Western Indian Ocean—Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar—around a shared vision for mangrove conservation and looking at the importance of mangroves to people,” she says.
Now, Global Mangrove Alliance coordinating members are moving forward with the development of national chapters on the ground in countries with local interest in forming them. It is a third step in the alliance’s phased approach. Colombia was the first to get started around two years ago, and others have since followed suit. In the past year, there have been efforts to start national chapters in several countries, including Kenya, Indonesia, México, and Ecuador.
“We were able to build momentum and build out our membership and then secure additional resources. We finally had an opportunity where we felt like we could start to expand work on the ground,” says Douthwaite.
World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy staff in Mexico began discussions about the potential national chapter at the end of last year. Along with other groups, both organizations have been working for years in the area of the Marismas Nacionales Nayarit biosphere reserve. Their incipient chapter efforts are focused on that area.
The biosphere reserve was established in 2010. It overlaps pre-existing ejido community rights and fishing cooperative permits, and its creation required approval from local ejido community residents all around the area. Several years of local engagement and negotiations with government authorities preceded the decree declaring the area a protected area, eventually fomenting community support for the reserve.
“They got involved in this model from its creation to its management, but not in the beginning,” says Víctor Hugo Vázquez Morán, director of the Marismas Nacionales Nayarit biosphere reserve, which is managed by the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas. “Generally in Mexico people think a protected natural area is not to be touched. If they see the US models they say no, as soon as an area is created here we won’t even be able to enter.”
Mexico has moved away from an expropriatory model, and the biosphere reserve designation provides even more leeway for community and economic activities. Community land and resource rights are respected, and their livelihoods are also protected from competition, as fishing and business rights in the area are restricted to locals.
The Marismas biosphere reserve, however, demonstrates how protecting mangrove forests themselves is not enough for conservation. Human activities and natural phenomena at sea and far inland can have drastic impacts on the balance of sediment and salinity levels required for mangrove habitat. Projects and infrastructure established prior to the creation of the Marismas biosphere reserve are still affecting the mangroves today.
Fifty years ago, the government excavated a channel between the Pacific ocean and Marismas waterways with the aim of boosting shrimp in the lagoons. Over the decades, the man-made Cuautla channel that was initially only the width of a road has eroded to more than 1.5 kilometers (about one mile) across and has generated coastal erosion displacing a nearby community. The additional influx of saltwater disrupted the balance of salinity, particularly in the Chumbeño lagoon, the furthest inland. That is what caused the mass die-off of mangroves in the lagoon, where community monitor González Díaz and other residents have engaged in some restoration efforts.
Highways and roads through wetlands areas disrupted freshwater flow and natural capacity to control flooding. Dams on most of the 12 rivers feeding into the Marismas, as well as increased water use by agriculture and populations, have restricted the incoming flow of freshwater and the dams have also decreased the levels of needed sediments, mangroves, and estuaries in some areas of the Marismas. In other areas, more intense inland storms in the watershed of a major undammed river are resulting in too much sediment.
Long-term comprehensive land and water management plans inland are needed, but overall the biosphere reserve is a conservation success story. In its first five years of existence mangrove coverage actually increased by three square kilometers (1.8 square miles) and since then only 0.32 square kilometers has been lost—to illegal pond-based shrimp farms, according to Vázquez Morán, who has been working in the area with the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas since before the Marismas reserve’s creation. The National Commission of Protected Natural Areas has a network of community monitor teams working in the biosphere reserve and inland areas of influence. and It also provides some small grants to support community projects.
“We increased the mangrove surface coverage, something no other part of the country or protected natural area has been able to show,” he says. “What better indicator than that could there be to demonstrate that the joint work with communities, ejidos, and other agencies from all three levels of government, with a lot of participation, is achieving the objective of the creation of the protected area: the conservation of these mangrove forests while they continue to sustain work and the economy.”
To support its work and economy, a philanthropic gift from corporate donors went to a cold storage room for the Ignlogar fishing cooperative in the Antonio R Laureles community, near the northern edge of the Marismas biosphere reserve. Without it, when locals brought in their shrimp or fish hauls, they had no choice but to sell to the intermediaries waiting on the shore at whatever price the buyers were offering.
In coordination with The Nature Conservancy, SmartFish, a Mexican NGO, undertook a Fishery Improvement Project for whiteleg shrimp with the Ignlogar cooperative. Fishery Improvement Projects are usually environmentally-focused collaborative processes between various stakeholders to improve sustainability in fishing and business practices. The fisheries can work toward applying for international Marine Stewardship Council certification.
SmartFish supports small-scale fishers that adopt sustainable practices to access better-paying markets by improving quality, implementing traceability, and addressing logistics and infrastructure barriers. With Ignlogar, SmartFish worked a fair bit on the management, administrative, and business side of things, but has also gotten the cold storage facility up and running, training local women in cold chain management, equipment maintenance, processing, and packaging traceable, value-added products. SmartFish has a marketing-focused offshoot branch that helps find markets for sustainable, small-scale fishing products.
“We work with cooperatives to give them tools that give them access to a preferential market, as long as they meet a series of criteria. They need to be organized cooperatives, possess use permits, and have a commitment to the environment,” says Alejandro Rodríguez Sánchez, one of the founding members of SmartFish, following a visit to the Ignlogar cooperative.
“We have an office that takes care of promoting demand for these sustainable products, because once that’s there, people on the supply side can close the cycle with purchasers,” he says. “We are trying to get the big chains to create responsible purchasing policies.”
Other cooperatives in the Marismas area have heard of Ignlogar’s experience with SmartFish and the Fishery Improvement Project and have expressed interest in projects of their own. The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund staff in Mexico have been analyzing where that might be possible. That has been the initial focus of the nascent Global Mangrove Alliance chapter in Mexico: pooling knowledge, experience and resources to figure out how best to collaborate to fill gaps and address local needs.
Back in the cold storage room outside the Ignlogar cooperative office, Dainen Jaramillo Barrera and Viridiana López Rodríguez are explaining what the procedures will be once the seasonal shrimp fishing ban lifts. They and 12 other women will be back to work in full swing, getting literal tons of shrimp on ice while they sort it by size and weigh it. They also work with line-caught white snook, preparing, packaging, and freezing high quality fillets that can fetch much higher prices than selling it fresh in the village.
Twenty years old, Jaramillo Barrera used to go out fishing with her husband before she got the job, and she loves seeing the stars while out on the water at night. She never affiliated as a cooperative member herself, as is the case for most women and youth who participate in fishing activities in the region. Ignlogar currently has 220 members, and only three are women. But that is starting to change, and the cooperative board members seem proud that it is. Of some 80 pending membership applications, most are young, and roughly half are women, according to the cooperative president.
It is only for part of the year, but working in the cold storage facility is López Rodríguez’ first formal job. A 28-year-old single mother of three, she never had the opportunity before, getting by with income from a little snack shop she set up out of her home. “We have learned so many things,” says López Rodríguez. She, Jaramillo Barrera, and many of the other women were very nervous when they first started, but now they could run the place—and they essentially do, with support from SmartFish when needed.
“Once we had started this work, we sent out [our product] and people said it turned out really well,” says Jaramillo Barrera. “People liked it, and that gave us motivation and joy to keep working.”
Scientists agree that global agriculture is losing crucial diversity in its plants, animals and microorganisms. But you can’t fix a problem that you can’t measure properly. That’s where the Agrobiodiversity Index comes in.
MONTPELLIER, France
On a chilly morning in late February, Natalia Estrada Carmona, an agricultural biodiversity scientist with the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), walks me through the Arceaux farmers market in Montpellier. As the freezing air fills with the scent of pan-fried sausages, pickled green olives, and freshly baked bread, Estrada Carmona stops in front of a kiosk showcasing a wide range of colorful brassica.
“In this market of local producers, you can still find local diversity,” she says. She points at broccoli and cabbage, listing each vegetable’s vitamin profile. It makes perfect sense that she would produce an off-the-cuff list—she and her colleagues have created one of the most important indexes in the field of agrobiodiversity, a list they believe can help, in its own way, save the planet.
Estrada Carmona grew up far from Montpellier, in a family of coffee farmers in Medellin, Colombia, during the height of the cartel violence. But her long interest in the role of food and agricultural diversity in society brought her here to southern France. Through her research, she realized that despite much public concern about biodiversity—the variety of life on earth and its loss—there was little attention to what was happening to agrobiodiversity, the wealth of plants, animals, and microorganisms used for food and agriculture.
When it comes to food species, we don’t even know what we’re missing. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species tracks the conservation status of only 30% of known edible plantspecies. While there are 6,000 different species cultivated for food worldwide, only nine crops (sugarcane, maize, rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet, and cassava) make up 66% of the world’s crop production. Of the 7,745 current local livestock breeds, one-quarter are going extinct.
While farmers markets like Montpellier’s still try to keep regional crop diversity alive, our global tendency has been a push towards cultivating monocultures and raising just a handful of livestock species. Estrada Carmona believes that this process is pushing nature, and consequently humanity, towards an unprecedented crisis. Malnutrition is rampant across the globe, and pest outbreaks are decimatingmonocultures.
“We are a more advanced society, with a greater lifespan and, in theory, a higher quality of life,” says Juan Lucas Restrepo, CIAT’s Director General. “But we have a poor diet, which is paradoxical.”
As we walk through the market stalls, Estrada Carmona, bundled against the cold in a long gray coat, expounds on our shortsightedness. Modern agriculture forgoes crops and plants that have fed humans for millennia. She points at dozens of local French cheeses displayed in a stand, calling them a last stronghold against mass-produced cheese filled with fructose corn syrup.
“In finance, if you say, ‘I’ll invest everything in only one stock,’ people will say you are crazy. But in agriculture, we do just that,” Estrada Carmona says. Among the many dangers of such a narrow focus, she says, is a loss of genetic resources that could be crucial in helping farmers address drastic climatic change.
But while many NGOs and grassroots movements worldwide had begun to work on agrobiodiversity, there was no centralized way to track what was getting lost and where. Why would anybody include agrobiodiversity in dietary guidelines or agricultural and environmental policies if it is largely invisible to governments, companies, and the public?
So, in 2017, Estrada Carmona and her colleagues created the Agrobiodiversity Index to“make the invisible visible.”
The Index
In 2016, Roseline Remans, a researcher of agriculture, environment, and nutrition at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and a consultant with Bioversity International, was at a conference in Rome with colleagues from around the world. Each was an expert in various disciplines related to agrobiodiversity, but their work was, to use an agricultural word, siloed. Remans said that the gathering was the “a-ha” moment for the inception of the Index.
Three months later, she presented the idea of creating an Agrobiodiversity Index to the board of Bioversity International at its Rome headquarters. Along with her team, she received a €150,000 grant from the European Commission to lay out the concept and structure of the Index. They contacted NGOs, companies, and farmers to understand which crucial aspects of agrobiodiversity should be measured.
“Would it really be feasible to bring all these different pieces together in a scientific way? And would there not be too many data gaps?” Remans recalls wondering.
Dr. Sarah Jones, a scientist on the Bioversity Multifunctional Landscapes team based in Montpellier, is a co-leader of the project. She says they believed from the start that the Index could help them understand how agrobiodiversity contributes to food systems. They identified three key metrics: consumption, agricultural production, and genetic resource management.
But it would not be simple to measure, for example, the status of agricultural production for a specific country and give it a score that policymakers can compare with other scores across the globe. So researchers added 22 additional indicators, like varietal diversity or landscape complexity, whose data was already present in consistent global datasets like the Domestic Animal DiversityInformation System, the FAOSTAT, or the global database for the distributionsof crop wild relatives.
Each country would get a set of scores at the end of the elaborate data aggregation, so its food system actors could make informed decisions in food and agriculture. Even then, there were challenges, says Remans. Data disparity is rampant: some countries do not have dietary guidelines due to a lack of resources, while others don’t report to the same databases as everyone else. And just a handful of cultivated crops, such as wheat, maize, rice, and soybeans, have globally available data compared to the thousands bred worldwide.
Francesco Sottile, professor of agrobiodiversity at Palermo University, believes the Index is a well-articulated trial. But he says it lacks some of the social aspects of agrobiodiversity, particularly when assessing how and to what degree local communities are preserving it.
Sottile remains hopeful the Index will become widely adopted in time. “Through the conservation of a bean variety, we can determine the conservation of an ecosystem,” he says.
Local Impact
At the Domaine de Mirabeau-Pole d’Excellence Agroécologique, a 520-acre farm in Fabregues just outside Montpellier, a sparrow hawk stops mid-air before diving into an open field. It disappears for a second before reemerging with a tiny mouse in its beak.
Cristiano Marinucci, an agroecological researcher at the Conservatoire d’Espaces Naturels d’Occitanie, has joined us at the Domaine. He looks at this bit of nature at work and smiles.
The Domaine is not directly affiliated with the Index, but its devotion to preserving agrobiodiversity is a leading example in the field. There are several breeds of sheep, goats, and pigs; a mix of grape varietals; a seasonal vegetable farm; a composting station; and a large stretch of Mediterranean bush and forest filled with holm oaks, wild olives, and hidden truffles.
“Test projects like this farm are important to showcase to farmers and policymakers [what can be done],” Estrada Carmona says.
Nowadays, sustainability is part of many companies’ business models. Remans has been working with large food companies (which she can’t name because of non-disclosure agreements) to implement the Agrobiodiversity Index at a corporate level. While she acknowledges some seek those scores for image building, she believes others are serious about using the Index numbers to propel change.
“Companies can then give incentives and longer-term contracts to the farmers to make the transition to incorporate some of these diversification practices,” Remans said. But corporations are profit-seeking enterprises; in the end, it will be up to policymakers to push for real change.
According to Restrepo, the Director General of the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, Peru is an example to follow. Over the past two decades, a few celebrity chefs began seeking lost local produce, like indigenous tubers and potatoes, for their recipes. In the process, they made agrobiodiversity “cool” and started a movement that has led to national policies promoting local food and crops in school canteens.
“This is something that the Index is capturing perfectly,” Restrepo says. Still, he admits that making the Index mainstream will not be easy.
“We are starting with a hostile environment,” he says. Lobbyists, industrial interests, and big multinationals are locked into the regulatory status quo. “Policies in countries are not pro agrobiodiversity, but pro the main staples.”
They have won some important battles already. Nearly 200 countries have signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) post-2020 global biodiversity framework, thereby committing to use the Agrobiodiversity Index. Over 50 companies like HowGood, an American sustainable food rating
company based in Brooklyn, have used whole or specific indicators of the Index as part of their business model.
Still, further research and funds are needed for its full-scale application in tracking agrobiodiversity from farmers’ fields to people’s plates. To illustrate the importance of agrobiodiversity, Jones uses a metaphor about a deck of playing cards.
All decks start with 52 cards, she explains. But take even a few out, and you’re limited in what games you can play. Suddenly, you realize the importance of a complete deck. The same concept applies to the prospect of losing even a little bit of agricultural variety.
“We don’t know the consequences of what we’ve lost until it’s too late,” Jones says.
The Nigerian start-up takes on the problem of food spoilage at all steps of the production and distribution chain, one solar-powered cold room at a time.
OBINZE, NIGERIA
In the courtyard of Obinze Fruit & Vegetable market, haggling has peaked for the morning. Retailers, drawn from far-flung villages and suburbs of Imo state, southeast Nigeria and neighboring city of Port Harcourt, crowd the contours of the market, hunting for bargains and fresh fruits. On a wood-framed table, under a trading booth made of stilts, rusty zinc, and leaky tarpaulin, dozens of vendors display lettuce, Chinese cabbage, purple cabbage, green beans, onions, cauliflower, strawberries, broccoli, and cauliflower.
Three women form a semicircle—their waists draped in multicolored Ankara fabric with tiny square patterns—in front of a half-dozen raffia baskets stacked with tomatoes, dripping with juice. In the soft soil, the juice leaves warped trails that become caked as the morning sun intensifies over the city’s 950,000 residents. Owerri’s strategic position and flashy hotels have helped it emerge as the region’s hospitality hotspot, attracting the affluent from the nearby commercial cities of Aba, Nnewi, and Onitsha, as well as the oil city of Port Harcourt. However, thronging open-air green markets such as Obinze, key to feeding Owerri’s guests, still dominate the food economy.
Close to the exit gate at Obinze, a squad of loaders brings down sacks of cabbage from a semi-trailer in the open field. Thirty-two-year-old Muhammed Usman observes his stocks among the rising heaps. Before turning one of the sacks over, he slashes the strings holding its rim together with a blade. The bruised cannonball cabbage that rolls out emits a strong and warm stench: its outer layers have become rotten, loose, and yellowish; no longer green and clutchy.
“Many have been damaged,” says Usman, as he lifts one of the cabbages. He speaks in hushed tones, but his apprentice picks up on the cue, takes out a pair of pen knives, and starts chopping, layer by layer. A pork farmer approaches, eyeing the heap of rotten cabbage.
“It’s now food for his pig,” says Usman.
Like the rest of the developing world, a large proportion of foods and fruits produced in Nigeria are lost before and after they reach the markets due to poor post-harvest handling. Fruits and vegetables are particularly vulnerable. Experts estimate that farmers lose 3.5 trillion Naira (8.1 million Euros) per year to food spoilage. The loss is significant.
“Fruit-farming and trading is a high-risk venture,” says Usman, who was losing around 300,000 Naira (700 euros) worth of fruits and vegetables monthly before 2016.
Usman is hardly alone. Half a dozen farmers and fruit traders across visited markets and farm clusters recount various scales of their losses. Many have incurred heavy debts and losses that sent them out of business and farms.
As the losses festered, farmers and traders contemplated multiple remedies. Some settled for water sprinkling as a way of keeping the skin of the fruits fresh. But it was “midnight cooling” which became most popular. Overnight, leftover stocks were spread out on bare floors, rugs, mats, and tarpaulins at Obinze Fruit & Vegetable market and other outdoor markets. “This didn’t work out so well,” says Ibrahim Danladi, a fruit trader for six years.
Midnight cooling exposed the fruits to the moist night breeze, but the produce also attracted rodents, snakes, cockroaches, and ants. Aside from feeding, poisoning, and urinating on the fruits, these pests also defecate on them and burrow into the soft shells. As a result, the fruits and vegetables develop bad taste and odor, as well as discoloration and contamination. “There were a lot of complaints from customers,” says Danladi. “Many fruits perished, particularly green beans.”
Twenty-five years ago, neither Usman nor Danladi knew Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, Executive Director of The Smallholders Foundation, an NGO in Imo state focused on sustainable agricultural development for rural farmers. The world of smallholder farmers, particularly in rural communities, captivated Ikegwuonu, now the CEO and founder of ColdHubs.
In 2003, he established a community radio station, which he used to reach out to farmers with advice. He traveled from one community to another, learning farmers’ opinions, sharing their concerns, and listening to their stories. Each episode of his “bush radio” broadcasting discussed his findings. He believed tackling the problems he had witnessed in those markets and rural communities required unusual action. After obtaining his Master’s degree in Development and Cooperation at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Pavia in Italy, with promising job offers from Europe in the pipeline, staying in Nigeria to pursue a career in clean-cooling in 2015 seemed an odd decision to some in his community. “Some felt I was running mad at that time. It didn’t make sense to my sister,” he recalls.
ColdHubs storage rooms extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables to 21 days, up from around two days. The social enterprise operates on a ‘pay-as-you-store’ subscription model, where farmers or traders pay approximately 48 cents for each 20-kilogram (0.46 euros ) plastic crate of fruits and vegetables stored overnight. Its reusable plastic crates with built-in hands have perforated edges to improve ventilation. Meat and seafood cost $1.3 per night (1.2 euros).
Each storage cold room cabin has a three-ton capacity. The energy produced by its 120-mm insulating panels, which are mounted on the cold room’s roof, is stored in high-capacity batteries. These batteries, in turn, recharge an inverter, which powers the refrigeration unit.
ColdHubs now manages 54 cold-room facilities across the country, a 12-fold increase since 2018. ColdHubs says it has reached over 5,000 outdoor food market traders and created jobs. In 2021 alone, 2,390 431 crates of fruits and vegetables were stored in 54 company-run cold rooms as well as 18 cold rooms built for and managed by small and medium-sized enterprises over 3,655 days. Each crate holds up to 20 kilograms (50 pounds) of food (multiplied by the number of crates and days to obtain the figures for saved food). Ikegwuonu estimates that approximately 62,700 tons of fruits and vegetables were saved from spoiling in 2021. The increased shelf life enables farmers to make more profits from sales and resist panic and cheap sales. “It’s a great help at a reasonable price,” says Usman.
Ikegwuonu and his team knew from their days in radio broadcasting that getting the technology ready would be a struggle.
However, driving mass adoption, the lifeblood of ColdHubs, required even more delicate measures: Farmers had their own rigid ideas about fruit and vegetable storage, some of which were deeply rooted in culture and experience. Spiritual beliefs, linked to the goddess of fertility and fortune, make farmers accept post-harvest losses as fate.
“There is already a culture in place,” says Terrence Isebe, ColdHubs’ chief financial officer. “It takes a lot of effort and credibility to move them away from that culture. It takes a lot of convincing and practical evidence to win their hearts. It happens gradually.”
Farmers in northern Nigeria, for example, have long preferred sun-drying tomatoes, despite this practice posing a significant health risk. Farmers slice ripe tomatoes and spread them out in the sun or on a smoking hearth to dry after harvest. The dried carcasses are stacked and sold at markets in baskets, nylons, and sacks.
While ColdHubs set out to improve the longevity of fruits and vegetables, they soon discovered that consumers had a strong addiction to spoiled fruits and vegetables, or at least to their lower price. Spoiled fruits can be easier to sell than fresh ones. “It is usually much cheaper. But cheap is not the same as healthy,” says Augustine Okoruwa, a food technologist with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN).
Okoruwa believes that thousands of Nigerians die each year from food poisoning linked to eating spoiled fruits, vegetables, and other food, though more research is needed to establish definitive facts and figures. Around 420,000 people die each year from eating food spoiled by heat. “Our dream is to provide people with fresh, safe, hygienic, and nutritious food. Foods without discolorations. Foods without water loss. Food without the loss of taste. Food without wrinkles,” says Ikegwuonu.
As a result, the ColdHubs team made educating traders and farmers on post-harvest handling of fruits and vegetables, as well as food hygiene, a core part of their awareness programs. They staged practical scenarios to supplement seminars. ColdHubs stored fruits for free in some new locations for the first few days to demonstrate the efficacy of their remedies.
Users gradually began to leave positive reviews. In early July, Abdullahi Albert, a carrot and tomato farmer in Jos, central Nigeria, requested additional cold rooms to meet the needs of the Farin Gada market there. “A single farmer can fill the existing cold room. More cold rooms are required,” says Albert, speaking by phone call. Similar appeals were made in Owerri’s Relief Market and Lagos’ Mile 12 Market. “We made certain that our solutions were unquestionable,” Ikegwuonu says.
ColdHubs isn’t Nigeria’s first foray into cooling stations. However, its model and success, according to Dr. Muhammad Imran, a lecturer in Mechanical and Design Engineering at Aston University in England, remain unique: “ColdHubs offered a pathway and a model for commercializing cold storage.” Its reliance on solar power made it clean and sustainable, while also lowering its operating costs.
The lifewire of cooling is energy. Cooling services account for approximately 17% of global electricity consumption. Nigeria’s outdated power grids, which are prone to frequent outages, are barely enough to meet the country’s energy demands. This year alone, the country’s national grid, which generates less than 4,000 megawatts of electricity for its 200 million population, has collapsed six times. In comparison, New York, a city of about 20 million people, generates twice as much electricity as Nigeria.
By using solar-powered cool rooms instead of fossil fuels, ColdHubs estimates that it has avoided emitting 1,040,688 kilograms (2,294,324 pounds) of carbon dioxide. Tackling the cooling deficit with fossil-fuel-powered cooling technologies also generates more heat and accelerates the climate crisis. But as more fruits are kept from spoiling, emissions from methane—a powerful greenhouse gas emitted by burning fossil fuels, raising livestock, and landfill waste, but also by rotting fruits and foods—are reduced. Some studies estimate that food waste accounts for about 7% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
Furthermore, ColdHubs addressed their solutions to smallholder farmers and small-to-medium scale traders. This group has been largely priced out of the expensive fossil-fuel-powered cool-storage systems. More than 80 percent of Nigeria’s farmers are smallholder farmers, largely restricted to rural communities where they lack access to storage technologies that can extend the shelf lives of their products. Only 8% of West African rural residents have access to electricity.
While many businesses want to emulate ColdHubs’ clean energy models, the road ahead is difficult. Renewable energy projects in Nigeria, like those in many other developing countries, are underfunded. Imran estimates that the start-up capital is at least ten times that of a fossil-fuel cooling station, which discourages “short-term and profit-driven” investors.
The state government is not encouraging innovations in sustainable and clean cooling. Importing key components for ColdHubs’ operations, for example, has been subject to high customs duties and delays. “The sector is neglected,” says Ogheneruona Diemuodeke, a renewable energy expert and lecturer at the University of Port Harcourt in Rivers State, Nigeria.
Reversing the trends, according to Diemuodeke, will require capacity building, intensive research, and increased funding support for clean-cooling initiatives such as ColdHubs. Businesses that emit few or no emissions should be rewarded with tax breaks, carbon credits, and additional funding from the government.
ColdHubs survived Nigeria’s difficult business terrain for seven years, during which many others have failed. It all started on July 30, 2015, with what Ikegwuonu describes as a “funny looking” improvised cool room made of plywood, stilts, bolts, planks, and a window-unit air conditioner. Growth has transformed—and multiplied—that basic structure into a modern version. Each cold room is composed of 5-inch thick, insulated panels, a stainless steel floor, a safety door to keep cold air inside, and solar panels mounted on the roof to charge batteries that supply energy for night cooling.
A white-painted modular cool room now sits in the center of the open-field market in Owerri. In the interior, crates of fruit are stacked side-by-side with name tags. A stack of booklets lies on a one-legged table in the nearby container office, where customers’ names and records are kept. Traders come in from time to time to deposit or collect their fruits, fish, or vegetables as the sun and heat intensify.
In solving one problem, however, ColdHubs inflamed the appetites of farmers and traders, who then asked for more help in overcoming post-harvest losses in transit.
“A complete solution,” as Dike Chinedu, ColdHubs’ head of supply chain and logistics, puts it, has to go back to the farm. “The sun heats up the fruits and even spoils them before you get to the market,” says Albert, a farmer of 27 years.
Chinedu observes that “so much time and life” is lost before fruits reach the market. Manual crop-harvesting, which is common in Nigeria, can take several hours to a few days. Refrigerated trucks for transporting farm produce are scarce and costly. Furthermore, flooded rivers and dams, rising mountains, and rutted roads inhibit access to thousands of food-producing communities and slow transit time.
When trucks break down on remote routes or in small towns, it can be difficult to find a mechanic on short notice. The nearest urban centers, where repairmen or auto parts are available, may be a long distance away. Mechanics are also wary of visiting those routes due to rising security threats and concerns.
Meanwhile, potholes pockmark transit routes. “The roads are dead,” says Zakriah. “There are times when I struggle for several hours to get past a bad spot.”
Seasonal traditional festivals and customs may mean that communities close their roads for a period of time. Truckers rarely protect produce from heavy rains, harsh sunlight, heat, and dust.
In mid-July 2022, ColdHubs launched two solar-powered refrigerated trucks. The trucks would pick fruits and vegetables directly from farms and deliver them to markets. “It is a moveable cold room,” says Emmanuel Monday, Coldhubs’ chief technology officer. “With the trucks, fruits can retain their freshness from the farm to the family table.”
The new trucks are better suited for packaging, which was a major shortfall in the existing transport system. Conventional trucks depend on tarpaulin to protect the fruit, which is tightly packed in bags and raffia baskets inside the truck, with no room for ventilation, and often exposed to rain, heat, and sunlight.
Tomatoes, carrots, and green peppers are stacked in hand-woven baskets made of palm frond fibers. These fibers’ edges are typically spiky. In transit, the soft shell of the produce bruises against the sharp edges of the basket as the vehicle staggers through potholes. As a result, the fruits get cuts and blisters and discolor. In some cases, the fruits packed at the bottom of the trucks are crushed by the weight of those above.
The new ten-ton ColdHubs trucks’ design aims to resolve these issues. The trucks’ frames are strengthened with extra fasteners, bolts, and grippers to keep them stable driving around potholes. The produce is kept in plastic crates vertically stacked and string-strapped from bottom to top: the weight of the fruit on top will not rest on those below.
As soon as the trucks arrived, the vendors at the Farin Gada fruit market in the northern city of Jos burst into a raucous celebration. “We were happy to set our eyes on that truck,” says Albert, the carrot and tomato farmer. “We need more of those kinds of trucks.” In Nigeria, food produced in the north is often sent directly to cities in the south, where the middle class pays a higher price.
Meanwhile, more ideas are being developed. ColdHubs will soon begin construction on a new set of cool rooms aimed at farm clusters in hard-to-reach communities. Farmers will then be able to deposit their harvests directly from their farms while waiting for pick-up trucks. “We want to secure every stage of the value chain,” Ikegwuonu explains.
While these other achievements are admirable, ColdHubs’ ultimate goal is to alleviate food insecurity and poverty by increasing the returns farmers, and food vendors get from their produce. Post-harvest losses recycle poverty. Last year, Mishack Adamu, a tomato and green pepper farmer in Kano, northern Nigeria, lost more than half of his crop to heat. “I’ve been deeply in debt,” Adamu says.
As farmers like Adamu continue to suffer from these losses, the widespread effect of food scarcity unsettles all of Nigeria. More post-harvest losses, according to Terrence, means less food available for households. Food scarcity, in turn, drives up prices, decreasing household purchasing power. Some researchers claim that the price of food has climbed by more than 100% just in the last few years.
Nigeria, a major food provider to West Africa, is finding it harder and harder to feed its people. The World Food Programme said that in 2021, seven out of 10 Nigerians did not have enough to eat, placing the country at risk of acute food insecurity. “Every morning, there are 200 million mouths to feed in this country,” Ikegwuonu says, gently stroking his dense dark beard, sprinkled with sparse gray strands.
Back in Owerri, at the ColdHubs’ headquarters, Ikegwuonu muses on the company’s future. A mural of green and white hues is painted on the wall behind him. A densely leafed star apple tree flutters outside the bungalow office.
When he got the idea for this business six years ago, there were only a few friends to cheer him on, some of whom worked as amateur laborers to help out. Ikegwuonu’s ambitions and challenges have shifted as he now operates in 22 states with over four dozen employees.
Now, he wants to provide at least a 100-ton storage cold room to each of Nigeria’s 36 states, up from the current 3-6 tons. He has also begun negotiations with the government to build a solar-powered “all fruit and vegetable market.” The existing markets didn’t include cold room spaces in their takeoff layouts.
Securing land for this expansion could be a nightmare. “It is one of our biggest difficulties,” says Terrence. Available spaces are becoming increasingly competitive and costly. Getting land in Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous city, took three years of concerted effort. There are also many other markets where negotiations for land and space have stalled, especially in the country’s south. “We want to solve these problems profitably,” says Ikegwuonu. “We do not want to constitute an extra burden on an already overstretched population. In all this, we have to keep our integrity and honor.”
Challenge: Eating in harmony with the world underwater
Against the backdrop of climate change and overall environmental degradation, oceans are often categorized as victims of warming, acidification, pollution, and vanishing species. They also instill fear as rising sea levels threaten food security and livelihoods. Economic inequalities facing coastal communities are another cause for concern. Regenerative ocean polyculture offers a powerful solution to these issues.
Until recently, researchers and investors alike paid little attention to the ocean’s own formidable potential to address these challenges. But as aquaculture becomes the fastest-growing food sector, the industry is under increasing scrutiny. And rightly so! Today’s conventional ocean fish cultivation, much like land-based agriculture, has many ecological drawbacks. One of them is the accumulation of excess nitrogen and phosphorus from feeds and fertilizers, causing dead zones in the oceans.
“Regenerative ocean farming is one of the most nutritionally, socially and environmentally sustainable food productions on the planet.”
Coincidentally, seaweed and shellfish have the distinguishing feature to feed on some of the excess nutrients to fuel their growth. They also capture part of the 25% atmospheric carbon oceans absorb every year. On top of buffering ocean eutrophication and acidification, growing sea greens and bivalves together in a polyculture system contributes to healthier marine environments. It provides diverse species with forage, refuge, and spawning habitats. This safe haven results in a 40% to 360% greater abundance of fish and invertebrates and up to 30% more biodiversity.
This regenerative mariculture can also bring about systemic social change. According to a World Bank study, farming seaweed in just 0.1% of the world’s oceans – about 40 million hectares – could create 50 million jobs. That coastal and indigenous communities have long cultivated mollusks and harvested wild seaweed is a tremendous opportunity to create an equitable blue economy driven by those most affected by changing climate and declining capture fisheries.
Nutrition-wise, despite low-calorie counts, seaweed and bivalves are incredible sources of the much sought-after protein and omega-3 fatty acids. The foodstuffs are also rich in potassium, iron, zinc, iodine, and multiple vitamins. All in all, regenerative ocean farming is one of the most nutritionally, socially, and environmentally sustainable food production on the planet.
Category: Winners
Challenge: A plastic-free fishing ground
Oceans are home to half of the earth’s biomass and 15% of our protein intake. When sourcing this food, the fishing industry tosses or loses loads of plastic-based fishing equipment overboard – up to 1 million tons every year, in fact. This abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear (ALDFG) leads to disastrous consequences for marine life, food production, and human health. As seafood production is expected to double by 2050, fostering a fossil-fuel-free fishing ground is of the essence.
Category: Winners
The challenge: Our need to increase yields without mining soils empty
Boiling it down to essentials, we have to produce more food on the same amount of land while respecting our planetary boundaries in ways that secure the health of humans, the biosphere, and our planet. Today’s agricultural practices do not deliver on these demands. Methods have to be reimagined and re-engineered, but not necessarily re-invented. Nature itself offers models that can be mimicked, if not all that easily.
Category: Winners
The Challenge: waste increase in urbanizing regions
Our rapid urbanization is claiming more and more land, putting added pressure on food systems and natural resources. Today, almost 60% of the world’s population lives in urban areas; a share expected to continue growing until 2050 when 68% of the global population is projected to live in cities.
The overall population increase and the growing number of people moving to urban areas will add 2.5 billion inhabitants to the world’s urban population by 2050, with almost 90% of this growth happening in Asia and Africa. Nigeria alone is projected to add 189 million urban dwellers.
Category: Winners
The Challenge: The methane threat on our plates and in our glasses
Like most ruminants, cows burp and fart a lot, the result of digesting the tough, fibrous plants they eat. Especially the burping results in high methane emissions, a bi-product of one of nature’s most ingenious mechanisms; the ruminants’ step-by-step system of multi-stomach compartments that converts grass and other plants – inedible to us – to the nutritious, tasty mixes of proteins and fat that end up on our tables.
Category: Winners
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