Esmée’s Director of Our Natural World, Liam McAleese, reflects on growing concerns about climate-related risks in food and farming and what genuine resilience means. He also shares how we’re thinking about this in our work on nature-friendly farming, as well our role as an investor.
Last week, two organisations we work with have again sounded the alarm on the climate and nature risks facing business. The message from both was pretty stark: too many company boards are sleepwalking into existential risks – for their businesses and for society.
Chapter Zero work with company directors to get climate and nature risk properly understood, discussed and acted on in boardrooms. At their flagship event last week, my takeaway was not comfortable: too many boards are still not doing their job when it comes to managing long-term risk and value.
But there was hope too. Sometimes a well-framed question from a non-executive director can lift heads, change the conversation and prompt action. Chapter Zero’s work is about creating more of those moments – and turning them into sustained change recognising there are directors and businesses that are leading change in this area.
Launched last week, Inside Track's new memo from senior food industry insiders on the risks facing food and farming. It makes a similar point from a different angle. Where food businesses are talking seriously about sourcing risks, too often the response is tactical adaptation: switch region, switch ingredient, diversify the supply chain.
Common to both conversations is one word: resilience.
It is everywhere at the moment. But I worry it risks becoming the new greenwash – a reassuring word that allows us to describe short-term fixes as a long -term strategy.
Real resilience surely has to mean more than protecting a company from the next shock. For us, as a long-term funder and investor interested in communities, environment and social justice, it means looking at the systems underneath the risk: healthy soils and nature, viable farmer livelihoods, resilient communities, fairer supply chains, and businesses prepared to invest for the long term rather than simply shift risk elsewhere.
Diversifying supply chains may buy time. It does not, on its own, make the food system resilient.
Building a more resilient food system
Under our nature-friendly farming priority, we are working both to influence the systems that shape farming now – from supply chains, markets and policy to finance – and to help build models for a more resilient agroecological food system for the future. That means supporting farmer-led learning alongside local and regional supply chains, new approaches to procurement and finance, and land justice: widening access to and influence over land so that a more diverse range of people and communities can shape how food is grown. Together, this is about making nature-friendly farming viable at scale while building a fairer, more diverse and less input-dependent food system.
Questions for investors
As an investor, the inside track memo is helpful to us and our advisors to ensure that we are asking the right questions of our fund managers - which is perhaps not “How resilient are the businesses we invest in?” but “What are the business we invest in doing to make the systems they depend on more resilient?” And as an investor, how can we use our investments as well as grants to help us move to a truly resilient food and farming system.
