The Food Systems Countdown Initiative 2024 Publications
Tracking Progress and Managing Interactions
Food systems are facing immense challenges. Malnutrition is widespread, many food-related jobs offer low wages and poor working conditions, and the environmental burden of food production threatens planetary health. A realignment of food systems is urgently needed to improve their contributions to social and environmental goals.
The Food Systems Countdown Initiative is a global interdisciplinary scientific collaboration that aims to track the progress of this transformation by regularly providing updated data on 50 food system indicators and producing thematic analyses related to key food system topics.
The 2024 Countdown publications analyze changes in indicator values since 2000, showing the direction and pace of travel towards or away from desired outcomes. The results of the analysis offer reasons for optimism: 20 of the 42 indicators with time trends examined have changed in a desirable direction, on average, globally. However, seven of 42 indicators have significantly worsened globally over this period and for 15 indicators, there has been no significant change despite the need for steady progress to meet key global goals.
The Food Systems Countdown Policy Report 2024
Read The Food Systems Countdown Policy Report 2024
Governance and resilience as entry points for transforming food systems in the countdown to 2030
What is the The Food Systems Countdown Initiative (FSCI)?
The FSCI is a collaborative effort to monitor global food systems. It brings together indicators that span food systems and provides annual analysis to inform policy, business, and NGO priorities and actions. It supports the transformation of food systems, so they become equitable, sustainable, and resilient and positively contribute to achieving the 2030 SDGs and other global goals.
The FSCI is working to build a science-based observational system using a food systems framework to track global food systems and their changes to 2030. Deliberately changing complex systems that cut across sectors, jurisdictions, and national borders calls for a comprehensive, ongoing program of scientific measurement and assessment of all aspects of the system and their interactions to guide decision-makers and hold those in power to account for transformation. Food system actors and stakeholders (e.g., civil society, governments, and international organisations) need actionable evidence to make decisions that can bring about food system transformation yet no such mechanism currently exists. Their research agenda centres around the evidence gaps exposed by moving from siloed, disciplinary analyses of agriculture, nutrition, health, and the environment to a comprehensive understanding of food systems.
The Food Systems Countdown Initiative is led by Jessica Fanzo of Columbia University, Lawrence Haddad of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Jose Rosero Moncayo of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), and Mario Herrero of Cornell University. Kate Schneider leads the data team and coordination together with several Johns Hopkins graduate students. The Initiative involves dozens of collaborators from nearly as many organisations from almost all continents.
