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Food Governance

Assessing agriculture and food system impacts

Agriculture and food systems are presently among the biggest drivers of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. Almost 80% of recent global land-use change impacts were associated with increased agriculture and food exports from Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia + Pacific (excluding China).

Much of the global agriculture and food system over recent decades has emphasized low-cost, high-output production, often described as the “cheaper food” paradigm which prioritizes maximizing yields and minimizing costs. This approach relies heavily on inputs like chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and water, along with unsustainable practices such as monocropping and heavy tilling. These methods degrade soils, ecosystems, and biodiversity, reducing the productive capacity of land and creating a cycle of intensified farming to meet growing demand. Additionally, this system reduces diverse landscape features, threatening or displacing wildlife, including native species and microbial organisms, while increasing reliance on resource-intensive foods. Globally, agriculture and food systems represent a major threat to 86% of species at risk of extinction, and are responsible for about 70% of freshwater withdrawal.

Unsustainable agriculture and food systems create enormous negative externalities and hidden costs. Yet, the interlinked negative impacts of agriculture and food systems – including water and ecosystem degradation, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, hunger, micro-nutrient deficiencies, obesity and diet-related diseases, and enduring livelihood stresses faced by farmers worldwide – can be overlooked in policymaking.

Thus, there is significant potential for policymakers to design interventions that simultaneously address multiple issues related to agriculture and food systems, equity and sustainability. To do this, policymakers need a thorough understanding of costs and benefits for all stakeholders within the agriculture and food system, including under-represented groups and future generations. Such an understanding would foster investment and policy actions – including fiscal support, regulations and voluntary standards – that prioritize nutrition, gender equality and environmental sustainability.

True cost accounting (TCA) is a powerful approach for uncovering the hidden costs of agriculture and food systems. TCA is a holistic and systemic approach to measure and value the environmental, social, health and economic costs and benefits generated by agriculture and food systems to facilitate improved decisions by policymakers, businesses, farmers, investors and consumers. However, TCA is a broad concept that can be applied in many diverging ways. TCA methods change depending on a country’s resources, data availability, capacity and reporting systems, which presents a notable challenge – particularly for low- and middle-income nations.

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Several methodologies, frameworks and tools are currently available to provide a basis to agriculture and food system governance and inform holistic policymaking.

FAO proposes a two-phase assessment using TCA to help decision-makers understand current and future agriculture and food systems and intervention areas to improve their sustainability:

  • Phase 1: Initial national level assessment to quantify and analyse the impacts and hidden costs of agriculture and food systems.
    • The main purpose of the initial phase is to create awareness regarding the significant challenges associated with national agriculture and food systems. Its goal is to connect these hidden costs to critical national priorities, such as reducing hunger or conserving limited natural resources. Additionally, it feeds discussions and dialogues with stakeholders in the corresponding country. Although it provides only a partial picture, this stocktaking exercise is a crucial starting point for addressing some of the most important challenges in national agriculture and food systems.
  • Phase 2: In-depth targeted assessments of specific components, value chains or sectors of agriculture and food systems.
    • The objective of this phase is to guide policy actions and investments in a specific country. The targets can be defined based on the results of the first phase or guided by country priorities per consultations with relevant stakeholders. To create a focused assessment, it is crucial to define the scope of the analysis effectively, ensuring it remains manageable while meeting its objectives. This begins by selecting the functional unit of analysis, which determines what will be assessed and measured (e.g. agriculture and food systems, dietary patterns, investment, organization and product). The targeted assessment process is organized into four steps:
    • Frame the issues: Step one involves reviewing the results of the initial national-level assessments from Phase 1. This helps to identify and target the key sustainability issues.
    • Document and analyse available data: Step two focuses on collecting and analysing available national or subnational-level data on the key sustainability issues to complement the Phase 1 estimates. Data can be sourced from international institutions, such as the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), FAO, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank, or from local entities such as ministries of agriculture, environment and health. Due to the diversity of agriculture and food systems and their contexts within countries, the national scale may be imperfect as an analytical unit for effective actions. Thus, depending on data and resource availability, national-level data should be complemented by spatial analyses, which will enable the heterogeneity of the main impacts and drivers of agriculture and food systems to be captured at the subnational level.
    • Assess levers: Step three identifies potential levers to address the key sustainability issues related to agriculture and food systems. Levers can affect the supply side (i.e. production and intermediaries), the demand side (i.e. food consumption), and public goods supporting agriculture and food systems (i.e. general services). After gathering and analysing data on the cost of different levers and estimating their benefits, levers can be compared, for example, by using cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analyses. Then, decisions can be made about which levers to employ. For this to be effective, the process should be inclusive and allow for dialogue and collaboration among all agriculture and food systems stakeholders, including policymakers, private-sector entities, local authorities, farmers and farmer producer organizations, as well as consumers and consumer interest organizations.
    • Employ levers and scale TCA: Step four involves two parallel, but linked, processes: (i) implementing and promoting levers to reform policies, investments and other interventions to address the concerns identified in the previous steps; and (ii) scaling up targeted TCA assessments to enable the monitoring of reforms and the expansion of TCA assessments to new areas of concern. The targeted assessment process is cyclical, whereby the scaling of TCA should not be viewed as the final objective, but the start of a new cycle of measurement and evaluation to ensure continuous positive results.

The FAO Framework for Action on Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture presents a set of actions and measures for the characterization, assessment, and monitoring of biodiversity in food and agriculture, which can strengthen the impact assessment process for agriculture and food systems. Some key measures are as follows:

  • Improve the inventory, monitoring, and characterization of associated biodiversity and wild foods, in agricultural systems including at the population level, as appropriate.
  • Consider relevant initiatives and existing tools, methodologies, and frameworks, strengthen existing and/or develop new tools, standards, and protocols for the inventory, assessment, and monitoring of biodiversity in food and agriculture.
  • Strengthen the role of citizen scientists, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and other participatory research stakeholders, as appropriate, for the assessment and monitoring of biodiversity. Also strengthen the role of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the governance and protection of ecologically sensitive regions.
  • Improve data collection and the development of metrics and indicators to measure the impact of management practices and approaches on the sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity in food and agricultural systems at genetic, species, and ecosystem levels.
  • In strengthening and streamlining assessment and monitoring programs for biodiversity in food and agricultural systems, use and integrate – as relevant, and to the extent feasible – existing assessment and monitoring systems (e.g. those developed for the SDGs, CBD, or the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture) and existing data and indicators, at national, regional and global levels.
  • Identify priority species, ecosystems, or ecosystem services for assessment and monitoring at the national level.

Comprehensive and targeted governance and institutional capacity-building measures such as the ones listed below are critical for systematically evaluating and addressing the multifaceted impacts of agriculture and food systems:

  • Inventory and review existing legislative, administrative and policy frameworks relevant to the sustainable use, conservation and restoration of biodiversity for food and agriculture, with a view to identifying gaps, weaknesses or inefficiencies.
  • Adapt policies and investment decisions in the various sectors of food and agriculture in a way that reduces ecosystem degradation and promotes the sustainable management of biodiversity and sustainable production systems.
  • Encourage, enable and create regulative frameworks for agricultural sector actors to improve transparency around the true costs or externalities of food production and supply chains and reduce their negative externalities, in line with KM-GBF Action Target 15.
  • Integrate agriculture and food system assessments into educational systems and into the training of government professionals, including the provision of concrete tools/skills for conducting assessments.
  • Establish cross-departmental government bodies to evaluate and implement agriculture and food system policies, and facilitate collaboration between different agencies, departments and ministries across which agriculture and food systems may span.
  • Establish requirements for all government agencies/departments to assess non-market costs associated with policies and programmes.
  • Integrate use of information from assessments into product labelling requirements. For more information on possible agriculture and food product labelling measures, see Regulating advertising of unhealthy and unsustainable food.
  • Apply integrated landscape thinking to foster systemic action and enable partnerships through initiatives such as urban-rural cooperation or environmental organizations and farmer-learning networks. See Agriculture in urban and peri-urban areas.
  • Promote peer-to-peer action research through participatory and practical applications.

Tools to support the assessment of agriculture and food systems impacts can include:

Tools

Reassessing the agriculture and food system represents a significant strategy for climate mitigation and public health improvement, directly supporting the objectives of the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, advancing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF), and furthering progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Climate change mitigation benefits

The integration of agriculture and food system assessments/TCA into government agency training, planning and general operation can increase awareness and consideration of the costs/impacts of government operations and policies on agriculture and food systems. By making the hidden environmental and social costs of agriculture and food systems visible, governments can identify their climate impacts, and subsequently:

  • reduce carbon-intensive practices (e.g., excessive transport, deforestation-linked sourcing) and redirect investment toward lower-emission alternatives.
  • reduce GHG emissions from agriculture and food systems across the entire value chain, from production to processing, distribution, and waste management. For example, governments can use this data to reduce methane emissions from livestock, support dietary shifts toward more plant-based foods, and scale up circular practices like food waste reduction and composting.
  • shift public policies towards supporting sustainable, equitable and transformative agriculture and food solutions such as agroecology, climate-smart agriculture, and shorter, more localized supply chains. These approaches tend to rely less on fossil fuel-based inputs (e.g., synthetic fertilizers and long-distance transport), and more on biodiversity, soil health, and efficient land use, factors that enhance carbon sequestration and reduce emissions over time.

Climate change adaptation benefits

Among the seven key areas of adaptation put forward in the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, assessing agriculture and food system impacts can directly contribute to:

Biodiversity benefits

Action under this policy option can help to deliver on several KM-GBF targets, including:

  • Target 1 (Plan and Manage all Areas To Reduce Biodiversity Loss): Impact assessment is a crucial step for informing spatial planning and land management. By promoting the widened adoption of impact assessment tools and methodologies, the policy option could be seen as a necessary step for making progress toward Target 1 of the KM-GBF. See Reducing land-use change and conversion of natural ecosystems for food production and Strengthening land-use and freshwater governance.
  • Target 2 (Restore 30% of all Degraded Ecosystems): Evaluating agriculture and food system impacts provides important data for tailoring restoration actions to the form of ecological degradation affecting any given land- and seascape. Furthermore, agriculture and food system impact assessments can inform the selection of production practices that are less harmful, or potentially regenerative under given social-economic and environmental contexts. Integrating biodiversity-friendly farming practices, such as maintaining semi-natural habitats within agricultural landscapes, can therefore help restore agroecosystems and enhance ecosystem services. Restoration of wetland ecosystems for agricultural and food system resilience, and Restoration of coastal and marine ecosystems for agricultural and food system resilience.
  • Target 7 (Reduce Pollution to Levels That Are Not Harmful to Biodiversity): Evaluating agriculture and food system impacts is crucial for reducing pollution from food production activities to levels that are not harmful to biodiversity. In the agricultural sector, for instance, impact assessments can help quantifying the risks of excess nutrients, pesticides, and other pollutants on ecosystems. The resulting information can then guide interventions to reduce excess nutrients lost to the environment and decrease the overall risk from pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals.
  • Target 10 (Enhance Biodiversity and Sustainability in Agriculture, Aquaculture, Fisheries, and Forestry): Assessing agriculture and food system impacts provides insights into the effects of current agricultural practices on biodiversity and helps identify more sustainable alternatives. By assessing these impacts, policymakers can promote biodiversity-friendly practices, such as agroecological approaches, which are crucial for achieving sustainable management in agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries, and forestry. See Nature-positive food production practices and Mainstreaming agroecology principles for food governance.
  • Target 16 (Enable Sustainable Consumption Choices To Reduce Waste and Overconsumption): Analysing agriculture and food system impacts is critical for reducing the global environmental footprint of food consumption patterns, particularly in relation to food waste and overconsumption, and identifying opportunities for changing dietary patterns. See Increasing demand for healthy and sustainable diets.

Other sustainable development benefits

Food systems are relevant to all the SDGs and are at the heart of at least twelve of the seventeen SDGs:

  • SDG 1 (No Poverty): Agriculture and food system assessments reveal how improving access to nutritious food and addressing structural inequalities can break the cycle of poverty and promote inclusive development by empowering rural populations, enhancing livelihoods, and fostering economic diversification. Specifically, investing in small-scale agriculture and ensuring equitable access to productive resources and markets has a stronger poverty reduction impact than investments in other sectors, making it a critical pathway to inclusive development.
  • SDG 2 (Zero Hunger): Impact assessments highlight how sustainable agricultural practices, reductions in food loss and waste, enhanced nutrition education, and equitable access to land and resources contribute to improving food security and addressing hunger at both local and global scales.
  • SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being): Agriculture and food system evaluations highlight that adequate nutrition supports disease prevention, growth, and cognitive development, while food insecurity leads to malnutrition and poor health. Targeted interventions to strengthen food security can significantly improve individual and community well-being.
  • SDG 5 (Gender Equality): Gender dynamics are closely tied to food security, especially where women play central roles in production, processing, and distribution. Assessing agriculture and food systems with a gender perspective uncovers structural inequalities and opportunities to empower women, enhancing both food security and sustainability.
  • SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation): Evaluations of water use and pollution from agriculture guide sustainable water management strategies and help reduce contamination through better waste control.
  • SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth): Impact assessments reveal how sustainable farming, fair trade, and rural investments promote decent work, reduce poverty, and foster inclusive economic growth within and beyond the sector.
  • SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities): Assessing agriculture and food systems reveals inequalities affecting smallholder farmers and marginalized groups, guiding strategies to improve resource access, support small producers, and promote equitable distribution.
  • SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities): Impact assessments inform policies to increase urban agriculture and food system sustainability by improving local food access, supporting urban agriculture, and reducing food miles.
  • SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production): Understanding of resource use and waste throughout the agriculture and food system guides the adoption of sustainable consumption and production practices, including the reduction of food loss and waste through circular economy principles.
  • SDG 13 (Climate Action): Agriculture and food system assessments reveal how climate change, through shifting weather, extreme events, and environmental degradation, threatens production and livelihoods. Evaluating these risks supports adaptive strategies like resilient farming and sustainable land management to bolster agriculture and food system resilience.
  • SDG 14 (Life Below Water): Assessing agriculture and food systems reveals how overfishing, pollution, and habitat loss threaten marine biodiversity and fish availability, guiding sustainable fishing, pollution reduction, and ecosystem protection to support food security and conservation.
  • SDG 15 (Life on Land): Agriculture and food system assessments show that biodiversity loss and land degradation undermine key ecosystem services vital to food security, such as soil health and pollination. Evaluating these impacts supports strategies for sustainable land use and biodiversity conservation to maintain resilient agriculture and food systems.

The effectiveness of agriculture and food system impact assessments relies on well-designed and properly executed interventions, which can be impeded by a range of technical and non-technical challenges, such as:

  • Lack of reliable, complete data, which can lead to large uncertainties and unreliable results.
  • Difficulty to achieve scientific and stakeholder consensus on agriculture and food system issues or processes, and of the boundaries of the system being assessed.
  • Difficulty in striking a balance between overly simplistic models which do not properly capture real-world processes or place-based information, and overly detailed/localized models which can be difficult to interpret and impractical for generating concrete, broadly applicable policy outputs.
  • Lack of capacity, funds and/or time.

Incorporating the following measures into a comprehensive and holistic assessment design can help minimize trade-offs and overcome implementation challenges:

  • Uncertainties due to lack of data, scientific consensus or other factors can be reframed in terms of confidence levels or possible risks, based on expert judgement. For example, the IPCC’s methodology and IPBES’s methodology provides confidence levels to statements based on levels of robustness and scientific agreement. Furthermore, uncertainty can be addressed by comparing results across different assessments and assessment methodologies/tools to reach more robust conclusions.
  • The assessment design should be transparent, inclusive and participatory, considering inputs of a wide variety of stakeholders to achieve representation, minimize contestation, and enable them to determine the appropriate level of model complexity.
  • Establish partnerships, particularly between institutions in low-income countries and those in high-income countries, to build the capacity and expertise necessary to conduct assessments and implement the resulting policy recommendations.
  • Some aspects of assessments, such as expert interviews and stakeholder engagement, can be conducted virtually to save time and money. In these cases, it is important to conduct proper online facilitation which ensures all participants can properly engage and voice their ideas.

Effective monitoring systems, clearly defined indicators, and comprehensive frameworks are essential for evaluating the outcomes of agriculture and food system assessments. The following section outlines tools and methods that can be used to monitor biodiversity, climate-related outcomes, and progress in agriculture and food system evaluation.

Indicators to monitor biodiversity outcomes

The Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to a comprehensive set of headline, component, and complementary indicators for tracking progress toward the targets of the KM-GBF. Some of these indicators could also be functional for monitoring the implementation of action under this policy option, including:

KM-GBF TargetHeadline or binary indicatorOptional disaggregationComponent IndicatorComplementary Indicator
Target 1A.1 Red List of Ecosystems
A.2 Extent of natural ecosystems
1.1 Percentage of land and sea area covered by biodiversity-inclusive spatial plans
1.b Number of countries using participatory, integrated and biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning and/or effective management processes addressing land- and sea-use change to bring the loss of areas of high biodiversity importance close to zero by 2030
Target 22.1 Area under restorationBy ecosystem functional group (Global Ecosystem Typology levels 2 and 3 or equivalent)
By indigenous and traditional territories
By protected areas or other effective area-based conservation measures
By type of restoration activity
Target 77.1 Index of coastal eutrophication
7.2 Pesticide environment concentration and/or aggregated total applied toxicity
For indicator 7.1:
By type of nutrient
By subbasin
For indicator 7.2:
By pesticide type
By use of pesticide products in each sector
7.CT.1 Cropland nutrient budget7.CY.1 Trends in loss of reactive nitrogen to the environment.
7.CY.2 Trends in nitrogen deposition
Target 1010.1 Proportion of agricultural area under productive and sustainable agricultureFor indicator 10.1:
By household and non-household sector farms
By crops and livestock
10.CY.1 Agrobiodiversity Index
10.CY.2 Soil organic carbon stocks
Target 1515.1 Number of companies disclosing their biodiversity-related risks, dependencies and impacts
15.b Number of countries with legal, administrative or policy measures aimed at encouraging and enabling business and financial institutions, and in particular for large and transnational companies and financial institutions, to progressively reduce their negative impacts on biodiversity, increase their positive impacts, reduce their biodiversity-related risks and promote actions to ensure sustainable patterns of production
By sector
Target 1616.CT.1 Food Waste Index
16.CT.2 Material footprint, material footprint per capita, and material footprint per GDP
16.CT.3 Ecological footprint

Tools to monitor biodiversity outcomes

Tools to monitor climate outcomes

No estimates of the cost of applying the different food system assessment methods and tools were found in public sources.

Notable examples of food assessment interventions include:

  • TEEBAgrifood provides past and ongoing case study examples of implementation of their evaluation framework in several countries. Several countries have used this framework to apply TCA and develop better agricultural land-use policies. For example:
  • The Ministry of Environment & Forestry and the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock & Fisheries in Kenya used the framework to conduct an assessment of the environmental, social and economic impacts along the value chain of the traditional use of forests and food systems in the Greater Mau Catchment Area. The assessment will inform policies such as the country’s 2030 Agenda by providing quantitative evidence of the biodiversity and ecosystem services of the area and the potential benefits of adopting different scenarios over the business-as-usual scenario.
  • The Ministry of National Development Planning (BAPPENAS) in Indonesia oversaw a TCA to inform its cocoa agroforestry policy and strengthen its policies overall to internalize natural capital costs and benefits. The interim findings contributed to the inclusion of agroforestry in Indonesia’s National Development Plan.
  • The iFEED methodology has been applied to generate country-level policy advice and future scenarios for four countries (Zambia, South, Africa, Malawi, and Tanzania).
  • France has used LCA-based methods to evaluate the environmental impact of local food policies. A study conducted in 2023 in the Mouans-Sartoux area assessed the effects of sustainable territorial initiatives on the local food system, including farmers, food retailers, and inhabitants’ diets.
  • The EU uses a set of agri-environmental indicators to assess the impact of agriculture on the environment, including biodiversity. These indicators cover areas such as agricultural land use, livestock patterns, and pesticide use.

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