Active Value is supporting the Integrated Data Systems Initiative, as part of our work toward multidimensional metrics for food systems finance and value chain management.
The IDSI is a 5-year innovation sprint, initiated in May 2023 by the Good Food Finance Network, for the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate Summit. The goal is to provide financial decision-makers in the public, private, and multilateral sectors with new tools to assess the landscape of risk and opportunity (including cooperative de-risking and the wider, long-term value-creation potential) inherent in resilience-building practices, emerging business models, and standardize the practice of “good food finance”.
Why do we need integrated data systems to support sustainable food production and distribution?
Agriculture depends on nature; nature is comprised of planetary systems that make water, nutrients, and growing conditions available in specific ways, in specific landscapes. If those systems break down, agriculture can fail. This can happen on one piece of land, with one crop only, or it can happen across an entire region, with devastating consequences for food supplies and economic and political stability.
Scientific observation of planetary systems shows we are, collectively, breaching at least five of nine core planetary boundaries—upper limits for resource depletion beyond which conditions optimal for human survival will be elusive and destabilizing dangers will proliferate. It is not enough to know that a given piece of land has enough water today, or this month, or that forecasts suggest drought is unlikely in the coming months.
Landscapes are more resilient and productive when they have richer biodiversity, including ecologically rich soils. Pollinator populations are more easily sustained when peripheral ecosystems, not directly involved in crop production, are healthy, robust, biodiverse, and resilient. Pesticides are less necessary when there is ecological balance and pest-managing insects can reduce the threat of plant diseases spread by other insects.
Financing into food systems is also a complex, multifaceted question: What incentives are driving investment? Are small-scale producers having a hard time accessing credit? What role do geophysical conditions play in the availability of capital? Is insurance available? What about early warning systems and disaster response and recovery in remote communities? What infrastructure is needed to make it easier to get produce from farm to market?
Alongside these questions, there is the question of whether financial institutions are responding to, or might be responsible for creating, unhealthy market dynamics—distortions of value creation that make it harder to expand overall real-world food systems value. This could be the result of a preference for high-volume financial returns. It could be related to what financial instruments a given institution prefers to use to maximize investment value for clients.
Earth-observing science platforms produce massive amounts of raw data—about temperature, wind and weather, cloud cover, atmospheric composition, and the marine biosphere. That data can help farmers, retailers, policy-makers, and investors make important and timely decisions that reduce risk and shore up food supplies and local economies. That can only happen, however, once the raw data have been translated into the actionable insights needed by non-scientists.
Connecting data systems that produce, distribute, and translate Earth observations into insights about future risk, emerging opportunity, needed resilience measures, and market dynamics, is an essential part of the climate value economy, and so is essential for designing and sustaining food systems that are resilient against sudden shocks. The integration process is complicated by the fact that each data platform and repository of data uses different parameters, refreshes across different intervals and traces trends over different timescales.
Each of those must be factored in, weighted, and cross-referenced, so multidimensional metrics can be as accurate, fine-tuned, evolving, and usable as possible.
In 2024, the GFFN released a Blueprint for Data Systems Integration. The following key messages were highlighted:
- Never before in human history has it been more important that we understand the extent of our impacts on the Earth system and its ecological life-supports.
- We need to develop data systems that are complex enough to not misrepresent the complexities of the living world, while producing integrated metrics that are easy to understand and act on, even for non-experts.
- The prevalence of affordable nutrition and good health shapes the overall quality of life and economic vibrancy of whole societies.
- Multidimensional metrics, based on integrated data systems, that provide summit to seabed health and resilience insights, can support new SME business models that diversify and revitalize local and rural economies.
Activv Food Systems work will focus on three primary areas of concern:
- Multidimensional metrics combining health, nutrition, climate, nature, economic inclusion, fiscal pressures, and financial returns;
- Data systems integration standards, practices, technologies, and business models—including value chain management, provenance tracking, labeling, and logistics;
- Practices attuned to the need for scalable innovation driven by MSMEs operating in local context.
Labeling is a key piece of the food systems data puzzle, because better labeling, supported by better, more diverse and replicable data, empowers consumers to make better choices and build economies of scale for health-building sustainably produced food. It should not fall to consumers alone to reshape food systems, but their leverage gives everyone else something to work toward—a clear signal that the market can shift in line with new incentives and innovative finance and cooperative de-risking strategies.
Right-scaling is not about leaving opportunity untapped; it is about ensuring everyone is equipped to play a role in de-risking, activating, and benefitting from expanded opportunity and resilience. The right insights, linked to local context, can kickstart the process.
