Business Publications
Towards a Climate-Smart Food System: A Theory of Change and Impact Metrics to Trigger Farming and Societal Change: Preliminary Report
Document Type
Report
Publication Date
10-18-2023
Volume
Theory of Change, sustainable food production, regenerative agriculture, communities of practice, public policy, supply chain, farming, agriculture, southern Ontario, metrics, outcomes, soil health, biodiversity, water retention, water filtration, Canada
URL with Digital Object Identifier
https://doi.org/10.5206/iveypub.78.2023
Abstract
There is significant interest in sustainable food production practices in Canada and worldwide due to the challenges caused by the Russia-Ukraine war, land degradation, and climate change. Sustainable food production is a food system that provides affordable, nutritious food while preserving and restoring natural resources and generating robust ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, water filtration, and retention. This report explores multiple routes to foster improved social, ecological, and economic impacts associated with alternative practices promoting sustainable food production. It identifies core problems that prevent agricultural systems and their food chains from implementing (more) sustainable practices. The report mobilizes a Theory of Change (TOC) to outline possible interventions and metrics to implement (community-based) interventions to promote shared principles of sustainable production and create communities of practice. The TOC was developed in consultation with a set of actors in the food chain (including farmers, financial institutions, municipal governments, food processors, NGOs and industry associations) during a nine-month research intervention in Canada (2023), complemented by a literature review. Thanks to this co-creation process, the proposed interventions and metrics to measure and track improvements at the farm and societal levels presented in this report are outcomes-based and bottom-up. This enables agricultural communities and actors in the food chain to pursue alternative routes to improve outcomes. The report also discusses incentives to pursue sustainable food production, either explicit (e.g. monetary payments, contractual clauses) or implicit (e.g. social norms, cultural values, network-based engagement of food chain actors). Lastly, it outlines a potential research design to test the suggested interventions, metrics, and incentives in a Randomized Control Trial (RCT).
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License