Food

Food is at the heart of many of the world’s environmental, social and economic challenges. The issues – from soil health to public health and sustaining a growing global population on finite resources – are complex and cannot be solved in isolation.

As it stands, the way we produce, consume and value food is pushing the planet and the communities we rely on beyond their limits. So how do we ensure we produce enough safe, nutritious and affordable food for everyone, in just and regenerative ways?

The world is responding to the pressures and the need for change. We’re seeing plenty of innovation and shifts, from increasing investment in regenerative agriculture, agroecology and nature-based solutions, to ongoing innovation in plant-based foods in societies where animal protein has dominated, as well as a growing understanding of the role of resilient local food systems in ensuring food and nutrition security. 

This all makes for a promising transition, but is it really adding up? 

Facing the intensifying impacts of our global climate, biodiversity and inequality crises, our food systems are at a crossroads. The transition will either be deep, deliberate and urgent – tackling the root causes of our challenges… 

…or it will fall short, failing to match the scale and urgency of change needed, with ‘solutions’ addressing specific problems in isolation. These ‘fixes’ will ultimately fail – going neither far enough nor fast enough, while simultaneously risking unintended consequences.

At Forum for the Future, we believe we need a shift to a just and regenerative, thriving food system fit for a radically different future; one that ensures affordable, accessible, healthy diets for everyone, while guaranteeing decent livelihoods, equity and resilience for food producers and workers, restoring natural ecosystems, and achieving rapid decarbonisation (we call this focus on the food system meeting multiple goals "sustainable nutrition").

This shift will take much more than incremental and siloed approaches; it requires deeper and more joined up transformative thinking and action, including moving away from the dominant narratives and mindsets that have been holding back deep and urgent change, and innovating in line with what the world really needs; it means rapidly scaling regenerative farming practices and models, and transforming supply chains, ensuring both climate mitigation and adaptation; and it must be a just transition, that builds shared resilience in the face of disruption for all concerned, from food-producing communities to citizen-consumers.

By 2030, we aim to have enabled a deep, urgent transition in our food system to fulfil the needs of diets, livelihoods and nature. We focus our work in two connected areas where we believe our skills, expertise and experience can make a real difference:

Scaling just and regenerative food and farming

Catalysing market-level changes, shared visions and new collaborations that unlock barriers to the regenerative agriculture transition.

Reframing food narratives

Enabling change-makers to centre social and ecological justice and regeneration in the narratives shaping food system change.

Across both areas we work in partnership with organisations ambitious to achieve positive change and impact in the global food system - including change-makers in the private sector, policy, civil society, academia and philanthropy, across food sectors and along the full value chain, and from trailblazing innovators to mainstream industry players. 

Drawing on our sustainability expertise, in particular in systems change and applied futures, and guided by our ambitious just and regenerative mission, we design, host and facilitate multi-stakeholder collaborations to tackle critical food system challenges and nurture the opportunities for deeper transformation; and we work on a one-to-one basis with partner organisations on cutting-edge strategy development and implementation, thought leadership, systems change capacity-building, and innovation.