Earth Day 2023: One planet, all players

Earth Day this Saturday marks seven years since the first signatories of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change pledged to keep global warming within sustainable limits. Seven may seem insignificant in the scheme of anniversaries, but it marks the halfway point in the time we have left to achieve our objectives. We now have seven years to deliver on the interrelated goals of zero hunger, zero deforestation and zero biodiversity loss.

SDG2, the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use and the 30x30 restoration target laid out in the newly adopted Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework all have a 2030 deadline, and are deciding factors in achieving a 1.5C, nature-positive and climate-resilient world. All will become increasingly difficult to attain with every increment of warming. None will be met without transforming the world’s food and land use systems.

With more than one tenth of the world’s population facing hunger, 40 percent of land degraded, and one third of forests lost, we are no doubt on the back foot. The latest IPCC report affirms this in excruciating detail. But it also makes clear that opportunity for a major course correction still exists.

Experts, colleagues, and even friends and family would question the likelihood of achieving our 2030 goals, given both the political and financial challenges the world now faces. But I remain optimistic, I believe that we could be on the brink of a breakthrough.

Here is why. Research from the Food and Land Use Coalition and the University of Exeter shows that a relatively small number of targeted interventions in the near-term could unlock the system-wide transformations needed to slash emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land use, while restoring nature and putting food systems back on track to meet our hunger, nutrition and development goals.

While rich nations, multilateral development banks and the private sector have an outsized role to play in financing these shifts, it is our job – as civil society – to keep steering them in the right direction. We can all help by continuing to collaborate – by shining a light and highlighting how the latest data, innovations, and solutions can be connected, scaled and implemented. Together we can draw down on the diversity of options we have at our disposal and drive forward a global patchwork of locally-led action that spans the entire food value chain.

Dropping the ball at this stage in the game is not an option. Investing in our planet still is. Many of us, including smallholder farmers, pastoralists and Indigenous communities have been doing it for millennia. All players must follow suit and maintain hope that – come the 60th Earth Day in 2030 – we will be on a fairer, more sustainable and resilient path.