There is a leadership imperative to urgently and thoughtfully reshape how we produce and consume food to make our food systems more sustainable and resilient. The requisite climate-smart and nature-positive production practices, technologies and inputs are increasingly well understood. What we must address together is how to support producer communities and value chains to meaningfully accelerate and sustain the adoption of these production changes.  Faster adoption will drive progress on the Paris Agreement’s 2030 global climate goals, possibly ahead of any other sector, and alleviate the stresses on one of our most scarce resources – water.

Individual farmers face many barriers – particularly economic risks – when adopting more sustainable production practices, technologies and inputs. This report seeks to accelerate the transition by proposing a clear roadmap for more effective collective action.  Crucially, successful transformation requires a major boost of diversified capital and breakthrough models of financing and collaboration to support farmers.  Many actors (public and private, within food value chains and beyond) have essential roles to play in providing that capital and deploying it effectively.  Using regenerative agriculture as an example – a critical part of the transition to sustainable food systems in its own right – the report proposes a model and roadmap for more effective coordination among these actors. The model supports farmers by providing a flexible set of financial and non-financial services and enables a broad set of actors to share the risks and rewards of regenerative agriculture.