Authored by The Food and Land Use Coalition, FOLU
Earth Day asks what we’re doing to protect the world we share. This year, start with something close to home and closer to the ground: the food on our plates, and the land that produces it.
Every year, Earth Day invites us to look at the world we share and ask: what are we doing to protect it? This year, we’re turning that question to one of the most powerful — and underused levers for security, resilience, and shared prosperity: our food systems.
At The Food and Land Use Coalition, a global coalition of organisations working together to transform food and land use systems, we believe this must change. Not through blame, but through bold, collective action grounded in evidence and possibility: Stories of Transformation.
These aren’t isolated stories, — they’re proof points of what’s possible when governments, farmers, financial institutions, researchers and civil society work together around a shared vision.
Start with security. Build confidence.
A secure food system is not a luxury; it’s our foundational infrastructure. When people can reliably produce and access affordable, nutritious and sustainable food, societies are more stable, economies more productive, and governments are able to plan for the future.
But security cannot be achieved in isolation, in an increasingly interconnected world, shocks ripple across borders. Securing food systems means investing locally while reinforcing global cooperation, not retreating from it.
Invest in resilience before the next shock hits.
Supply chain disruption, economic volatility and extreme weather events are no longer future risks; they are today’s realities. Resilient food systems can absorb or bounce back from these shocks and keep societies functioning. That means supporting farmers to adopt regenerative practices, sustainably managing resources, diversifying production, reducing losses and strengthening value chains.
The evidence is already there: when farmers, businesses and governments align around resilience, productivity can increase alongside environmental restoration.
Aim higher: prosperity for people and planet
The real opportunity lies beyond survival. Today’s food systems carry enormous hidden costs to health, ecosystems and economies, but transforming them could unlock inclusive growth and shared prosperity.
Imagine food systems that create millions of jobs, revitalise rural economies, improve diets, and restore nature. This is not hypothetical. From school feeding programmes that buy from smallholder farmers to regenerative agriculture creating new markets, examples of what could be already exist. The question is not whether transformation is possible, — it is whether we will scale it fast enough.
What Earth Day asks of us
Today of all days, we are reminded that the Earth does not negotiate. It responds. Treat the soil well, and it feeds us. Allow it to degrade, and we face the consequences. The same is true of forests, freshwater systems, and the biodiversity that underpins them all.
So this Earth Day, we are calling for action from all those with a role to play:
- Governments: can treat food and land use systems as strategic national infrastructure, aligning agriculture, environment, health and economic policies behind a shared vision for transformation.
- Businesses: can invest in sustainable and resilient value chains that deliver long-term value for people, for nature, and for the planet.
- Financial institutions: can mobilise capital at the scale required to support the transition that the evidence already shows is both necessary, achievable and profitable.
- Communities and civil society: can continue to drive accountability, innovation and ambition from the ground up.
- All of us: recognise that no country can secure its food future alone. The ecological systems that feed us cross every border. The cooperation needed to restore them must do the same.
The ground beneath our feet is not an abstraction. It is the source of everything we eat, everything we build, and everything we hope to leave to those who come after us. This Earth Day, let’s treat it that way.
