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Greetings from London!
The Food Tank team is in the UK for London Climate Action Week (LCAW), an event that launched in 2019 and has quickly become one of the largest independent advocates for climate action in the world.
Since this year’s LCAW began last weekend, tens of thousands of advocates, researchers, business and finance leaders, policymakers and others have convened here for hundreds of events and conversations focused on how we can mobilize finance and policy support for the transition to a greener climate.
I want to start with a powerful quote from a conversation earlier this week about the state of climate policy.
“We cannot go back to the world we knew before extreme weather,” said Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s secretary of state and special envoy for international climate action. “Imposing a pause is not an option, but we have the ability to build a better, more resilient future.”
Climate debates have been particularly tough this week as heatwaves sweep across the globe, breaking more than 1,400 temperature records from Greece to India to the Middle East. For roughly 80 percent of the world’s population, high temperatures over the past week are roughly twice as likely due to human-made emissions and environmental damage.
And with food and agriculture systems responsible for roughly one-third of total greenhouse gas emissions — not to mention other environmental problems that can result from over-industrialization and non-regenerative practices — food advocates need to play a key role in providing accountability and building solutions.
“You can’t solve climate change unless you solve the food system,” former Unilever CEO Paul Polman said at a Climate Action Week event in London a few days ago. “Unless we, as a government, look at food holistically across our entire strategy, we’re not going to solve it.”
So far, there have been some encouraging developments from London Climate Action Week.
Building coalitions on research and data remains a big priority. A new coalition, Mission 2025, has been formed by a range of businesses, financial institutions, and city and regional leaders to step up efforts on climate change. Ahead of the February 2025 deadline to submit emissions reduction plans to the UN, the coalition was convened by Groundswell along with Global Optimism, Systems Change Lab, and Bezos Earth Fund, and is supported by companies such as IKEA and Unilever. The coalition’s main focus will be to help provide data to justify policy changes in the world’s 20 largest economies.
And Imperial College London’s new Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein, along with a recently announced sister center at North Carolina State University, will help research solutions to make the food ecosystem more sustainable.
Securing funding to advance climate action has been a major theme throughout this year’s LCAW. This week, The Earthshot Prize, a funding initiative launched by Prince William in 2020, is hosting a series of events to connect innovators and problem solvers with influential advocates and investors. And yesterday, the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) announced additional participants to a new project that connects companies with committed investors representing over $15 trillion in assets to donate to causes that protect biodiversity and supply chains.
And as new “first-of-its-kind” green jobs analysis published at LCAW shows, city-level climate action can have huge positive economic and social impacts. Across the 74 cities studied, from Accra to Vancouver, the transition to a greener economy has already supported nearly 16 million jobs and has the potential to create countless more.
I think the legal system will play a big role in advancing or blocking climate action in the future. Today at LCAW, the Grantham Institute will be releasing its Global Trends in Climate Litigation Policy Report for 2024, and I will be interested to see how civil society and other activists will use litigation to force governments and corporations to comply with climate change regulations. (It is also concerning to see corporations and interest groups using legal means to block progress on climate change.)
In just a few weeks, British voters will face their first election since the UK left the European Union. Of course, a lot has changed since then, but caring for the well-being of people and the planet should not be a politically divisive issue.
“Political leadership is crucial to driving transformational change in our food systems and climate,” Anna Taylor, executive director of the nonprofit Food Foundation, said at a recent LCAW event, calling on the new administration to “set a bold course to align the interests of business, the public sector and people.”
“We live in complex, ever-changing systems, and to achieve truly resilient communities we need to learn as we go,” Jesper Hornberg, CEO of the Global Resilience Partnership, said earlier this week.
Learning from each other and building bridges between the food, tech, investment and other climate action sectors is also at the heart of Food Tank’s presence during London Climate Action Week.
Tomorrow, Food Tank, Google Cloud, and Nomad Foods will be hosting a summit in collaboration with Compass Group, Oatly, and the Sustainable Food Trust, with advice from the Food Policy Centre at City University London. If you’d like to attend this high-level event, click here to read more details.
Our fantastic lineup of speakers includes: Tim Allen, Spoon Guru, Rob Barker, University of Kent, Jack Bobo, University of Nottingham, Katrin Burt, Grosvenor Food & AgTech, Amy Chapple, Youth Farmer, Julia Collins, Planet FWD, Zitouni Ould-Dada, FAIRR, Lord Deben, Stefan Descheemaeker, Nomad Foods, Richard Dillon, Ivy Farm, Neil Fletcher, Nomad Foods, Morgan Gillespy, Food and Land Use Coalition, Andreas Gyr, Google EMEA, Simon Hall, Google Cloud, Lawrence Haddad, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Sam Hamrebtan, College of Naturopathic Medicine, Crop Trust (World Food Prize 2024 Laureate) Gina Kennedy (Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT), Asma Khan (celebrity chef and UK restaurateur), Sarah Montgomery Taylor (Google Health), Will Nicholson (WRAP), Holly Purdy (Horner Farm), Caroline Reid (Oatly), Christian Reynolds (City, University of London), Abbie Rose (Vidacycle & Farmerama), Dorothy Shaver (Unilever), Tim Stevenson (Compass at Google London), Sharon White, Darshan Wignarajah (Climate Policy Initiative) and Romy Wilkin (Jones Food Company).
And just like in the first half of 2024, we’ll continue to travel the U.S. and the world for the rest of the year to participate in and host these urgent and meaningful conversations. Later this summer, we’ll visit Washington, DC; Knoxville, Tennessee; Des Moines, Iowa; and other cities. In September, we’ll host a variety of events during New York City Climate Week. Learn more here.
Please keep an eye on our social media and FoodTank.com over the coming days as we continue to update you on further developments during London Climate Action Week.
And as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts by emailing me at danielle@foodtank.com. What developments are you hoping to see this summer, both in London and elsewhere? I’ll be on the ground representing Food Tankers, so let’s chat about what we can do to add to the discussion taking place in your community!
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