Food systems are complicated combinations of interdependent social, economic, environmental, and political systems. Globally, the food and agribusiness industry represents 35% of all jobs and close to 10% of GDP. However, food and agriculture collectively account for more than 30% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and over 80% of tropical deforestation and biodiversity loss. It is estimated that one third of all food is wasted, yet up to 2.3 billion people face moderate or severe food insecurity, a figure exacerbated by recent crises. At the same time, more than one billion people are obese and diet-related diseases are the leading risk factor for death in most countries in the world. Two-thirds of working adults living in poverty rely on agriculture for their livelihood. Transforming food systems is essential to meeting net-zero, nature positive goals by 2030, providing dignified livelihoods, and delivering improved nutrition and health to 8 billion people.

It is incontrovertible that we need to transform our food systems. Now is the time to focus on the “how.” Our fundamental premise is that, while subnational contexts are important and often diverse, countries at the national level are the locus of transformation. Since the first UN Food Systems Summit in 2021, 117 countries have committed to transform their food systems in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. While this is important progress, so far, few countries have translated those commitments into specific, integrated roadmaps. The pace and scale at which change is happening is simply not enough to meet global goals by 2030.

Led by Vikki Tam, Bain teamed up with the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Nature and Climate platform in 2022 to support a project focused on identifying repeatable models for country-level food systems transformation. Drawing on examples of successful transformations in a handful of diverse countries over a roughly 20-year period, the report offers insights on the actions and investments that – when done concurrently - can accelerate a country’s transition towards better food systems. Among them: government policy and related tools, public private partnerships, technology innovation, financing, enterprise and corporate action, and multi-stakeholder coalitions. Realizing this ambition will require an unprecedented level of collaboration among government leaders, capital providers, companies, entrepreneurs, and NGOs.

Led by Juan Redondo, Bain teamed up with the WEF in 2022 to support one semester project focused on the “Evolution of NFTs.” This project aims to inform business leaders, policy makers, and the general public of the benefits and risks associated with this digital asset and how they can be leveraged to generate positive social impact

The output for this initiative will be an informative briefing paper and digital display that provides an overview of NFTs, plausible use case examples across several industries (e.g., gaming, retail, media, CPG, etc.), and recommendations for various stakeholders for how to use NFTs to make the greatest positive social impact. We are generating learnings working with industry leaders through a series of interviews to extract the best insights holistically on use cases, technology, market places, etc. We are combining these learnings with primary research to develop an informative report for companies and global leaders who want to have a better understanding on how NFTs can deliver positive impact.

The Circular Transformation of Industries is a newly created initiative at the World Economic Forum, resulting from a collaboration across Bain & Company, the University of Cambridge, and INSEAD.

Representing a joint initiative across the Forum’s Center for Industrial Transformation and Center for Nature and Climate, the effort is being led through a partnership between our Performance Improvement team, led by Hernan Saenz, and our Sustainability & Responsibility team, led by Jenny Davis-Peccoud. The main objective of this multi-year engagement is to accelerate the shift to circular operating and business models, leveraging circular approaches to unlock productivity, resiliency, growth, and innovation, while achieving more sustainable outcomes. In particular, it plans to build a global community of companies championing circularity to transform our global systems and decouple economic growth from resource utilization.

Circularity is not a new concept. Over the past 20 years, businesses, industries, and governments have experimented with circularity initiatives, but very few have succeeded at large-scale implementation. Without a holistic approach across multiple value chains, the circularity movement has hit a fundamental barrier: the added cost and complexity of becoming circular outweighs the added benefits. The Circular Transformation of Industries will upgrade the narrative and reality of existing circularity-related efforts to factor in the unique systems-wide lens required to enable such a paradigm shift at scale.

We aim to build a thought-leadership platform combining unique insights and actionable tools to transform existing linear operating and business models into cutting edge, circular models. Our purpose is to translate this knowledge into tangible impact by supporting our communities of CEOs and senior executives to develop and deliver industry transformation roadmaps in the context of the necessary public-private collaboration.

The Shaping the Future of Advanced Manufacturing and Value Chains Platform of the World Economic Forum brings together a diverse community to enable solutions to the greatest challenges facing multiple industries, accelerating the growth of advanced manufacturing while helping stakeholders fulfil their social responsibilities.

Led by Hernan Saenz, head of Bain’s Performance Improvement practice, Bain teamed up with the World Economic Forum in 2020 to support the multi-year project focused on “Circular Operations and Value Chains Through Traceability.” Its purpose: to build a global alliance of manufacturers, suppliers, consumers and regulators that leverages technology, data, and operating changes to create traceability and drive greater resilience, productivity, sustainability and circularity outcomes across the world’s value chains.

Supply chains have always played a key role in driving customer satisfaction and fulfilling a company’s promise. But now supply chains must do much more than simply deliver the product that customers want, when they want it. Today’s supply chains must be resilient to dynamically react to changes in the business environment, while also making the brand promises of sustainability a reality. In order to scale up efforts to reduce, reuse, recycle and remanufacture, stakeholders across entire supply chains must scale the adoption of digital traceability tools. This will provide businesses with valuable capabilities that they need to see across their end-to-end value chain and deliver the sustainable products and services customers and investors expect, while also providing better cost and operational outcomes.

We are generating learnings working with traceability pioneers and industry leaders through pilots in the consumer products, retail, electronics, and manufacturing sectors. We are combining these learnings with insights from workshops and primary research to develop how-to guides and approaches for companies who want to gain a competitive advantage by increasing their traceability capabilities to become more efficient, resilient, and sustainable.

The Leaders for a Sustainable MENA group of the World Economic Forum brings together a group of 35+ high level participants from ministries, businesses and financial institutions from the region focused on accelerating the corporate led climate action and sustainability related topics in the MENA.

Led by Akram Alami, Raja Atoui and Dharmendra Hiranandani, Bain teamed up with the WEF in 2022 to support the recently constituted regional grouping that focuses on the current corporate climate action gap in the region and tries to build a case for more action on energy, food and water sustainability with an eye on upcoming COP 28 in Dubai.

Climate change is the most significant challenge of our generation, and nowhere is its impact more visible than the MENA region. The region has been heating up at twice the global average for past four decades, and is projected to be 4°C warmer by mid-century. Coupled with this, growing desertification, dropping water-tables and increasing heatwaves threaten the habitability across the region. While the governments are playing their part in setting up the net zero ambition and creating an enabling environment, companies need to shoulder the responsibility of delivering the sustainability action. There is an urgent need to raise corporate ambition, execution capability and resource availability to move the discourse on climate adaptation forward. Bain’s partnership with WEF’s LSM group is specifically designed to identify levers to raise cross-border public-private collaboration in the region to deliver meaningful outcomes.

We are generating learnings working on analyzing current corporate commitments from the region and identifying optimal decarbonization pathways that work to address region’s problems. We are combining these learnings with insights from member workshops and primary research to develop the roadmap to COP 28 through a series of lighthouse projects – bold, aspirational ideas that want to challenge the status quo in the region and demonstrate collaboration with the LSM members. Eventually, in the run up to COP 28 next year, we aspire to release a roadmap and toolkit for the change hungry climate leaders of the regions for supporting their capabilities to become more sustainable and more resilient while delivering a net zero transition for the region.