Nature positive for net zero
Photo by Karolina Kaboompics
For some time, the environmental impact of the food and drink industry — from sourcing ingredients to the packaging of products, virtually each stage of the food industry, in fact, — has generated very fulsome headlines.
Did you know that nearly 1 billion tonnes of food is wasted each year? Or that food production accounts for 26% of total global greenhouse emissions? The food industry is constantly under scrutiny as the percentage of food waste, and increase of greenhouse gas emissions is brought up continually.
So, EIT Food launching a new Alliance (The International Alliance for Food Impact Data) to develop and test standards for the environmental impact data of food is a positive move for a variety of reasons. One being, the Alliance will be convened by the Foundation Earth team, who are joining EIT Food, and have been instrumental in leading a European-wide drive towards the environmental scoring of food and drink products.
A second is The International Alliance for Food Impact Data provides a welcome opportunity to address the lack of standards and coordination between stakeholders at an EU and international level, which has hampered the roll-out of environmental scoring standards.
Environmental impact data is seen as key to transforming food systems. The challenge has been a growing number of different methods and labels are in use globally, but they all adhere to different standards, meaning they aren’t comparable and it is difficult for policy-makers, companies and consumers to assess the actual environmental impact of different food and drink products.
There is also a need to improve both the quantity and quality of data. Hopefully, the Alliance will want to focus efforts on generating more data where greater accuracy counts the most.
If the Alliance can look into ways to make collecting and sharing data easier that would be of enormous benefit. This includes seeing how data already collected can be re-used, and looking into how different systems could share data. These would reduce the number of times stakeholders have to enter the same data into different systems.
For the food and drink industry to meet its net-zero commitments, it helps enormously that The International Alliance for Food Impact Data has a mandate to develop internationally adopted and accepted standards for the environmental scoring. As an industry we are making positive strides towards tackling the environmental impact of food and drink, so developments such as these will have a lasting impact on the health and wellness of the planet.
We can’t be net zero without being nature positive. The Alliance knows it, and is now moving ahead.
