Food and Biodiversity in Action: Learning from practical journeys towards sustainable futures

Food and biodiversity are deeply interconnected. How we grow, trade, and consume food is a leading driver of biodiversity loss, yet healthy ecosystems are essential for food security, nutrition, and resilience. The IPBES Nexus Assessment highlights the potential of nexus approaches to deliver co-benefits across systems, but how to do this in practice?

We collaborated with partners from government, business, civil society, and research institutions to learn from diverse use cases on what it takes in practice to strengthen synergies and manage tradeoffs between food and biodiversity. Using purposive sampling we selected cases from diverse entry points and settings, spanning across communities, landscapes, policies, finance, business coalitions, international trade and value chains, and across settings in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.  

Six cross-cutting lessons emerge: 1) Progress often depends on champions—individuals, organizations, countries, or networks—who mobilize skills, energy, awareness, and resources to move efforts forward. 2) Food security and biodiversity goals can conflict, especially where land, water, and livelihoods are at stake. Yet when equity, healthy diets, water, and well-being enter the conversation, synergies become stronger than trade-offs. 3) Beyond local to global, stronger mutual understanding, connections and coordination between different scales helps unlock wider impact. 4) Each use case involved new collaborations that pushed organizations beyond their traditional boundaries and comfort zones. 5) Change is urgent, but intentional transformation takes time. Most initiatives showed lasting change over 5–20 years, beyond typical project cycles. 6) Progress depends on learning in action from what does—and does not—work, adapting along the way, and pairing monitoring with reflection to guide future action.

Together, these journeys point to a broader transformation in which biodiversity and food are increasingly integrated to achieve benefits for both people and the planet. Represented as a beehive that can grow over time, the growing bundle of use cases welcomes contributions expanding our collective knowledge. As Parties prepare national biodiversity strategies for COP17's review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, these documented pathways, complemented by a practitioner-oriented toolkit, provide insights for translating commitments into implementable actions, inspiring new partnerships and encouraging others to share their learnings and pathways.