Food: Advancing Systems Innovation

The Climate Action & Food Systems Alliance

On Earth Day, 2025, Climate Civics and GIFSEP (the Global Initiative for Food Security and Ecosystem Preservation) announced the creation of a Climate Action and Food Systems Alliance (CAFSA).

The Alliance will bring together key networks, leaders, and stakeholders, to foster innovation to protect watersheds, restore ecosystems, and drive climate-resilient development that supports better livelihoods, affordable nutrition, better health, and sustainable shared prosperity.

CAFSA.net

Good Food Finance

Recognizing the need for innovative, inclusive, sustainable food systems finance, as one of the major levers for climate crisis response, in 2024, Climate Civics joined the Good Food Finance Network group of core coordinating partners.

The Good Food Finance Network was created by the EAT Foundation, the FAIRR Initiative, Food Systems for the Future, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)—alongside the historic UN Food Systems Summit in September 2021—to support critical innovations across the landscape of food-related finance. The Access to Nutrition Initiative joined the core group of coordinating partners, in 2023.

In March 2025, CCI began to produce the new Good Food Finance newsletter, which will feature news from GFFN activities, from the partners, and in thematic areas related to GFFN priorities.

The wider list of supporting partners includes: the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the World Bank Group, The Global Environment Facility (GEF), The Green Climate Fund (GCF), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Just Rural Transition Initiative (JRT), and the Transforming Urban-Rural Food Systems Consortium (TURFS).

Through our Resilience Intelligence program, will now lead coordination of the GFFN’s Integrated Data Systems Initiative. The first major output from CCI’s engagement is release of a ‘Blueprint for Good Food Finance Data Systems Integration’—which aims to guide development of exploratory integrations of data systems, technologies, platforms, and metrics. 

CCI FOOD SYSTEMS WORK

Why data systems?

Resilience Intelligence emerged from our engagement in the COP22 round of UN Climate Change negotiations, in 2016, and focuses on expanding access to sustainable development outcomes by:

  • valuing risk reduction and structural economic benefits of resilience-building investments;
  • emphasizing the importance of macrocritical resilience;
  • advancing a robust climate-smart economy that creates real opportunity for all.

Several areas of work linked to Resilience Intelligence position CCI to lead the IDSI endeavor:

  1. Briefing notes on fiscal resilience, sustainable development spending, and the transition to climate-neutral economies;
  2. Detailing of areas of action, like the people-centered Reinventing Prosperity approach to building back better;
  3. Developing a multi-system, all-sector comparative Resilience Value financial metric;
  4. Mapping Earth systems science data financial data systems and wider action and innovation efforts.

CCI brings our own mission and values to this work, recognizing the rights of stakeholders, the value of participation, and the importance of addressing multidimensional challenges in ways that make life safer and more livable for everyone. As with our empowerment and advocacy efforts, we want innovative sustainable food finance—and the data systems that inform and grade it—to activate these principles:

  • Rights — By virtue of existing, you are a climate stakeholder; you have a right to expect a healthy climate and a livable future.
  • Participation — Inclusive civics allows for participatory design, where outcomes are attuned to human need and sustainable wellbeing.
  • Integrity — We believe the best solutions are informed by science, and use evidence to plan responsibly—in line with rights, participation, and efficacy.
  • Efficacy — We support policies that drive clear, widespread, effective reductions in climate pollution, while building sustainable prosperity.

Building Climate Value

Another part of this work, for CCI, is the connection to our Climate Value Exchange—which aims to support groups of countries formulating and enacting multidimensional multilateral climate cooperation (MMCC) agreements. Another way to say that is: it’s a cooperative innovation space for mainstreaming climate action investments, benefits, and for achieving the related economic diversification and revitalization.

This connects to Good Food Finance in a number of ways:

  1. The Good Food Finance Facility—a co-investment platform for food systems transformation—will serve as a leading example of a multilateral cooperative endeavor, informed and energized by Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement.
  2. Through in-person and virtual exchanges, like the 2024 Interparliamentary Exchange, Climate Value will anchor discussions around a broad range of policies needed to support climate-smart, sustainable economies.
  3. Non-market multilateral cooperation in line with Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement can drive the economic diversification and focused investment in climate-related co-benefits that good food finance entails.

Our Greatest Challenge

Our March 2025 newsletter was devoted to Food Security: Our Greatest Challenge. We highlight a number of our emerging and ongoing initiatives around food systems innovation and transformation, and we wanted to highlight for our network and allies how and why the climate-related food systems challenge is more urgent and potentially more difficult than transitioning energy systems, for instance.

While we know exactly what technologies we can use to decarbonize energy systems, and it is up to human beings to invest in and build those new systems, the stability and security of food systems over time will depend on how nature responds to our efforts. Whether we can secure food supplies for generations to come will depend on how we grow food, how we use land, what kind of financing goes to whom, whether we successfully decarbonize energy systems, transport, and industry, and on how natural systems respond.

Resilience is an integrative endeavor, and requires success across a diverse array of considerations.

Local leadership for health-building sustainable food systems

To support expanded civic engagement, insight-sharing, and practical cooperation, to transform food systems locally, CCI introduced the City Food Finance Principles for Building Climate Value:

  1. Common Reality – Health-building, nutritious, sustainably produced food should be an affordable, accessible everyday option for all.
  2. Delivering Impact – Cities deliberately play the role of impact investor, to shape healthy, sustainable food environments.
  3. Urban-Rural Feedbacks – Cities work with surrounding rural areas to support convergence of consumption, production, and incentives.
  4. Multilevel Cooperation – Cities engage with regional and national authorities to support enhanced implementation of national climate, food, health, and biodiversity plans.
  5. Co-Investment – Cities engage proactively to shape and mobilize investment partnerships linked to a broader Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation.
  6. Tracking and Labeling – Cities act as critical intermediaries to support needed data systems integration and multidimensional metrics.

Each of these principles can support value-building investments that improve health, quality of life, and economic opportunity.

  • Cutting across all six is the opportunity for cities and regional governments to reward impact investors that get capital and capability moving to innovative start-ups, effective community-based networks, and wider regional cooperatives.
  • A second cross-cutting area of action is the localization of financial innovation, to support the optimized increase of capital to micro-scale, and small and medium-sized enterprises that improve conditions in local economies.
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