WMO Regional Office for Europe supported by the Regional Association VI experts contribute to the Food Systems Countdown Initiative
The UN Food Systems Summit generated global attention on food systems and set the stage for food system transformation.
It is widely recognized that enhancing all aspects of food systems and their interactions, a clear, rigorous, and comprehensive set of metrics and indicators are required to guide decision-makers and to hold them accountable. However, currently no rigorous mechanism exists to track the state of food systems, their change, and performance over time.
With the ultimate objective to fill this gap, the Food Systems Countdown Initiative (FSCI) was formed in a partnership between FAO, GAIN, and Johns Hopkins University as a comprehensive, independent, inclusive, science-based mechanism to provide actionable evidence to track progress, guide decision-makers, and inform transformation.
The initiative will deliver a set of indicators in an inclusive way and part of the development of the indicators will be a series of regional consultations organized by FAO.
As a member of the Issue Based Coalition on Sustainable Food System within the UN Regional Collaborative Platform for Europe and Central Asia, the WMO Regional Office for Europe was invited to participate in the regional consultations, held on 25 May 2022, with the view to contribute and provide a particular support to the break out session on environment and climate, which is one of the five thematic areas that the indicator framework covers.
In this regard, the Office invited Dr Elena Mateescu, the vice-chair of the WMO Standing Committee on Services for Agriculture and the chair of the WMO Regional Association VI Working Group for Services and Applications, to contribute to the consultations and thus, help in shaping up a set of environment and climate indicators. The meeting ended up with a draft FSCI Indicator catalogue to be further revised within this Initiative.