Our food system is key to restoring nature’s diversity and abundance
In 2022, the UK government joined 195 other countries in adopting the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15). The framework is a roadmap to reduce global threats to biodiversity, including four goals for 2050 and 23 targets for 2030.
The UK has committed to all 23 targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework
Last month, all signatory countries to the United Nations Environment Programme’s Convention on Biological Diversity met in Yerevan, Armenia, to assess their progress on its targets for the first time.
Food production is the most significant driver of biodiversity decline
Biodiversity is declining at a faster rate than at any other time in human history, and food production is the most significant driver of that decline.
Many of the framework’s targets are relevant to food production, including Target 7, which aims to reduce “the overall risk from pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals by at least half, including through integrated pest management”, noting that these have “particularly harmful impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services”.
Despite some progress in the right direction, the UK government have admitted in their own Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP) that progress remains mixed, with considerable challenges remaining, particularly in fully addressing pesticide risk. The UK is not alone in being off track to meet the Global Biodiversity Framework’s 2030 targets, including and beyond Target 7.
We’ve been calling for restrictions on pesticide use
This year, the Soil Association has been calling for the UK government to ban the use of glyphosate, a potent herbicide linked to human health and environmental harms, as a pre-harvest desiccant.
In addition to glyphosate’s use as a weedkiller, the product is often sprayed on cereal crops just before harvest to dry them out uniformly. But this can leave residues behind in the crops, which are then used in foodstuffs like bread and cereals, presenting a risk to human health.
Our campaign calling for this ban, Cut the Chemicals from our Food and Fields, has received widespread support, including from more than 67,000 people who signed our petition.
Restrictions on glyphosate could help the government meet its commitments
In a briefing to policymakers in support of the campaign, we outlined how restricting the use of glyphosate in this way would help the UK meet its commitments to Target 7.
As glyphosate’s current UK authorisation period comes to an end and we await news of an EU-UK deal that would require us to align with EU pesticide regulations, where glyphosate’s use as a pre-harvest desiccant is already banned, we hope to see a positive response from government to our call to action.
For many parts of our food system, our biodiversity impact is offshored
Intensive livestock systems and ultra-processed foods rely on crops like soy, palm and cocoa grown in formerly-forested areas, impacting biodiversity and local people.
Target 15 of the Framework commits Parties to “take legal, administrative or policy measures to encourage and enable business” to “regularly monitor, assess, and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies and impacts on biodiversity” and “provide information needed to consumers to promote sustainable consumption patterns”.
With food production such an important driver of biodiversity decline, monitoring and disclosing impacts can identify areas of particular risk, help food companies set targets to address their impacts and enable government and citizens to hold them to account for their activities.
Unfortunately, Target 15 is described in The Global Report on collective progress in the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework as “challenging” for many Parties, including around the issue of corporate reporting being largely voluntary. Progress is being made in the UK, including around the publication this year of UK Sustainability Reporting Standards, but these remain lacking in terms of nature impact.
Our food system needs to transform
The Global Biodiversity Framework’s Target 10 commits countries to ensuring that areas under agriculture are managed sustainably, “including through a substantial increase of the application of biodiversity friendly practices” and “agroecological and other innovative approaches contributing to the resilience and long-term efficiency and productivity of these production systems and to food security, conserving and restoring biodiversity and maintaining nature’s contributions to people”.
There was even a specific agenda item at the Biodiversity Summit on soil biodiversity.
We hope to see good progress on this and the other negative impacts from food and farming on biodiversity in the remaining years to 2030.
The Soil Association works farm to fork
The Soil Association is specially placed to address biodiversity on farms, as we work from farm to fork.
About 70% of the UK is farmland. Our food system will need to transform if every farmer and grower has a viable pathway to farm in harmony with nature and if we are to realise a future where nature’s diversity and abundance are restored across the UK.
Rapid, global action is needed to tackle biodiversity decline
As another Biodiversity COP closes and exhausted delegates return home from a fortnight of fraught negotiations, the work needed to turn things around for biodiversity at home and globally is all the more urgent.
Later this month the Climate COP will meet in Turkey for a further two weeks of negotiations on efforts to save our planet.
The momentum is there and we know what needs to be done. We just need to get on and do it.