From Global Goals to Greener Plates: Empowering Nature with Sustainable Diets
Armed with the Montreal-Kunming Global Biodiversity Framework, we embark on an immense and urgent challenge to ‘bend the curve’ of biodiversity loss by 2030. No matter how ambitious our conventional efforts are for protecting and restoring nature, these efforts alone will not be enough to bend this curve. Crucial transformative changes are needed in the way society produces and consumes. Biodiversity efforts tend to focus on sustainable production, but sustainable consumption is increasingly acknowledged, especially at the global level. When it comes to sustainable consumption, the food we eat really matters. Shifts to healthy and environmentally sustainable diets will simultaneously address climate change and biodiversity loss and enhance human health and longevity.
One immediate opportunity to leverage these benefits is to connect often overlooked allies working on National Dietary Guidelines, National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans, and Nationally Determined Contributions to climate action. These tools represent country-level short- to medium-term plans to realize commitments to food, biodiversity and climate goals. Connecting these will help to combine conventional actions with new courses of action, mobilize new collaborations and allies, and shape change together with more significant and faster effects.
This session will explore how to connect these important processes: What is needed for national governments to play a more central role in shaping dietary choices that are more in line with global health, biodiversity and climate targets? What dilemmas do different countries face, given their local realities and contexts? The purpose of the session will be to share knowledge across different countries, strengthen collaborations between science, policy and practice, and encourage country commitment in connecting their national dietary, biodiversity and climate plans and commitments. This is the beginning of a WUR-WWF collaboration to weave together interdisciplinary science, cross-sectoral policies and diverse societal values on food and nature. The insights in this session will be used to provide science and policy perspectives that can inform the 2024 Summit of the Future on how to better connect dietary, biodiversity and climate goals to positively impact people’s lives.