Dispatch From London Climate Action Week

Danielle Nierenberg

Danielle Nierenberg

The Food Tank team is here in the United Kingdom for London Climate Action Week (LCAW), an event that started in 2019 and has quickly become one of the world’s largest independent drivers of climate action.

Since this year’s LCAW kicked off last weekend, tens of thousands of advocates, researchers, business and financial leaders, policymakers, and more have all gathered here for hundreds of events and dialogues focusing on how we can mobilize funding and policy support to transition to a greener climate.

I want to start off with a powerful quote from a conversation earlier this week on the state of climate politics. 

“There is no going back to a world before extreme weather events,” said Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s State Secretary and Special Envoy for International Climate Action. “There is no option to push pause. But we have the skills to shape a better, more resilient future.”

Climate discussions feel particularly stark this week, amid heat waves that have swept the globe and broken more than 1,400 temperature records everywhere from Greece to India to the Middle East. For about 80 percent of the world’s population, the high temperatures over the past week have been made about twice as likely by human-caused emissions and environmental damage.

And because food and ag systems are responsible for roughly a third of total greenhouse gas emissions—not to mention the other ecological issues that can result from hyper-industrialized and non-regenerative practices—food advocates need to play vital roles in both taking accountability and building solutions.

“You can’t solve climate change if you don’t solve the food system,” said Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, at a London Climate Action Week event a couple days ago. “If you don’t look at food holistically across your whole strategy as a government, you can’t fix it.”

So far, we’ve been seeing some promising developments come out of London Climate Action Week.

Building coordination on research and data continues to be a huge priority.  A new coalition called Mission 2025 has been formed by a variety of companies, finance institutions, and city and regional leaders to increase their climate ambition, ahead of a February 2025 deadline to deliver their emission-cutting plans to the U.N. The coalition—convened by Groundswell along with Global Optimism, Systems Change Lab, and the Bezos Earth Fund, with backing from corporations like Ikea and Unilever—will primarily help provide data to justify policy change in the world’s 20 largest economies.

And the new Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein at Imperial College London, along with a sister center announced recently at North Carolina State University, will help research solutions to make food ecosystems more sustainable. 

Securing financial support to drive climate action is a major through-line we’re seeing at LCAW this year, too. Throughout the week, the Earthshot Prize—a funding initiative launched by Prince William in 2020—is hosting a series of events to connect innovators and problem-solvers with influential backers and investors. And yesterday, the organization Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) announced additional participants in a new project that connects companies with engaged investors, representing more than US$15 trillion in assets, whose contributions are tied to actions that protect biodiversity and supply chains.

And as shown in a new “first-of-its-kind” analysis of green jobs released during LCAW, city-level climate action has massive positive economic and social impacts. Across 74 cities studied, from Accra to Vancouver, a transition to a more green economy already helps support nearly 16 million jobs and has the potential to create countless additional employment opportunities. 

When it comes to advancing—or blocking—climate action in the future, I think we can expect to see the legal system play a major role. At LCAW today, the Grantham Research Institute is set to release their 2024 Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation Policy Report, and I’m interested to see how civil society and other advocates will continue using lawsuits to force governments and corporations to comply with climate regulations. (We’re also seeing corporations and interest groups using legal avenues to stop climate progress, which is concerning.)

In just a couple weeks, voters in the U.K. are set to head to the polls for the first election since the country left the European Union. So much has changed since then, of course, but it remains true that caring for the well-being of people and the planet should not be a politically divisive issue! 

"The need for political leadership is extremely important” toward catalyzing food system and climate transformation, said Anna Taylor, the Executive Director of the nonprofit Food Foundation, during a recent LCAW event. She called on the incoming government to “be bold in setting the direction of travel to align business, public sector and citizen interests.”

As Jesper Hornberg, CEO of the Global Resilience Partnership, said earlier this week: “We are in a complex, changing system, and we will need to learn as we go to deliver truly resilient communities.”

Learning from one another and building these kinds of bridges—between food, tech, investment, and other sectors for climate action—is at the heart of Food Tank’s presence here at London Climate Action Week, too. 

We’re holding a Summit tomorrow, presented by Food Tank, Google Cloud, and Nomad Foods in collaboration with Compass Group, Oatly, and the Sustainable Food Trust, and advised by the Center for Food Policy at City, University of London. If you’ll be attending this high-level event, you can read more about what’s in store by CLICKING HERE. 

Our incredible lineup of speakers includes: Tim Allen, Spoon Guru; Rob Barker, University of Kent; Jack Bobo, University of Nottingham; Katrin Burt, Grosvenor Food & AgTech; Amy Chapple, Youth Farmer; Julia Collins, Planet FWD; Zitouni Ould-Dada, FAIRR; The Rt Hon. the Lord Deben; Stefan Descheemaeker, Nomad Foods; Richard Dillon, Ivy Farm; Neil Fletcher, Nomad Foods; Morgan Gillespy, Food and Land Use Coalition; Andreas Gyr, Google EMEA; Simon Hall, Google Cloud; Lawrence Haddad, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN); Sam Hamrebtan, The Life Larder, College of Naturopathic Medicine; Geoffrey Hawtin, Crop Trust (2024 World Food Prize Winner); Adele Jones, Sustainable Food Trust; David Jackson, Winnow; Gina Kennedy, Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT; Asma Khan, Celebrity Chef and British Restaurateur; Sarah Montgomery-Taylor, Google Health; Will Nicholson, WRAP; Holly Purdey, Horner Farm; Caroline Reid, Oatly; Christian Reynolds, City, University of London; Abby Rose, Vidacycle & Farmerama; Dorothy Shaver, Unilever; Tim Stephenson, Compass at Google London; Dame Sharon White; Dharshan Wignarajah, Climate Policy Initiative; and Romy Wilkin, Jones Food Company.

And just as we have during the first half of 2024, we’ll continue traveling around the U.S. and the globe during the rest of the year to participate in and convene these urgent, meaningful conversations. Later this summer, we’ll be in Washington D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Des Moines, Iowa; and elsewhere. In September, we’ll be holding a variety of events during NYC Climate Week, which you can read more about HERE.

I hope you’ll keep an eye on our social media and FoodTank.com over the next few days—I’ll keep you posted about additional developments from the London Climate Action Week. 

And as always, I want to hear back from you, too, by email at danielle@foodtank.com. What developments are you hoping to see, whether here in London or elsewhere this summer? I’m here representing Food Tankers on the ground, so let’s discuss how we can help elevate the discussions taking place in your communities!

(Danielle Nierenberg is the President of Food Tank and can be reached at danielle@foodtank.com)