Accelerating Sustainable Agriculture: Insights from Global Leaders at New York Climate Week

Author: Katherine Nelson

At New York Climate Week September 21-28, 2025, the World Economic Forum’s First Movers Coalition for Food convened a session featuring global leaders from the agrifood industry, finance sectors, and public institutions. The conversation focused on the urgent transition needed to build resilient, low-emission, and climate-smart food systems. Bringing together multiple perspectives, the session highlighted breakthrough financing models, innovative procurement strategies, and collaborative pathways towards the upcoming COP climate negotiations.

The Challenge of Scaling Sustainable Procurement

One of the central themes was the transformation of procurement from merely a cost-and-quality function to a strategic lever for long-term competitiveness, resilience, and sustainable value creation. Despite promising pilots in regenerative agriculture and climate-smart solutions, scaling these efforts remains a formidable barrier. This challenge, dubbed “pilot purgatory,” underscores the difficulty of moving from isolated projects to broad market adoption.

Historically, sustainability initiatives have been driven by dedicated teams within companies, but these programs often struggle to grow beyond small scales. Key issues identified include the lack of large-scale, credible demand signals and limited scalable financing models that do not rely solely on consumer green premiums. Novel procurement models are required, particularly models that align large-scale farmer adoption with mechanisms that allow for sharing costs, risks, and claims.

Diverse Commodity Contexts Require Tailored Approaches

The discussion explored two distinct commodity procurement models as bookends illustrating the need for context-specific strategies. For highly commoditized crops like North American row crops, mass balance sourcing models—where sustainability commitments are linked to landscapes rather than specific supply chains—could lower traceability requirements while supporting outcomes at scale.

Conversely, for products like Brazilian beef, where traceability and supply chain integrity are critical, alternative sourcing models are necessary. These models embed sustainability attributes directly into contract specifications, and require long-term investments in technical assistance and traceability systems. Such models ensure compliance and cater to consumer and regulatory demands for responsible sourcing.

Four Essential Building Blocks for Breakthrough Progress

Across commodities and geographies, four universal elements were recognized as vital for scaling sustainable procurement:

1. Large-scale Demand Signals: Clear and credible commitments that motivate producers to adopt sustainable practices.
2. Tailored Farmer Services: Integrated service stacks offering financing, technical assistance, and monitoring, often facilitated by trusted farmer-allied organizations.
3. Valuation and Cost-sharing Mechanisms: Systems that attach value to sustainability outcomes while distributing costs, risks, and claims fairly across the supply chain.
4. Innovative Financing Structures: Blended finance models combining catalytic, concessionary, and commercial capital to fund transitions effectively.

Achieving these requires unprecedented collaboration across industries, sectors, and within organizations. CGIAR is uniquely positioned to serve as a convening organization for such collaboration on carbon projects due to the need for subject-matter experts and rigorous scientific oversight to ensure the credibility of claims. Using a blended finance model, CGIAR institutes can coordinate the project preparation to be “investment-ready”. This approach mobilizes grant funding and patient capital alongside commercial investment, efficiently managing risks and costs to unlock scalable, inclusive, and sustainable agricultural carbon projects with strong scientific oversight and impact measurement.

Addressing Methane: Innovation and Measurement

Methane reduction in agriculture was highlighted as a crucial pathway for limiting global warming. Several members of the First Mover’s Coalition for Food mentioned innovative approaches in the livestock and rice sectors focusing on accelerating technology adoption, lowering costs, and developing faster market-based greenhouse gas protocols and verification tools to facilitate scaled methane mitigation.

Government and Policy Perspectives: Brazil Leading the Way

Representatives from Brazil underscored sustainable agriculture as a strategic imperative. Brazil’s commitment includes policy frameworks offering lower interest rates for sustainable practices, traceability programs for beef, and leadership roles in COP agriculture agendas. Hosting COP will showcase their solutions and reinforce their position as a key player in global sustainable agriculture efforts.

Conclusion: The Path Forward – Collaboration, Innovation, and Scale

The session reaffirmed a collective understanding: the pathway to climate-resilient, low-carbon food systems is clear, but the challenge lies in accelerating adoption and scaling finance, technology, and farmer engagement. The integration of financial innovation, demand-driven procurement, inclusive partnerships, and robust policy frameworks forms the foundation of this transformation.

Leaders emphasized that success requires collaborating beyond organizational silos—aligning procurement, finance, sustainability, and supply chain teams. Empowering farmers with upfront capital, technical assistance, and trustworthy market signals is crucial. Innovations in methane mitigation, traceability, and blended finance present new opportunities.

As COP approaches, the agrifood community must harness shared insights, deepen collaboration, and commit to breakthrough models that deliver impact at scale.

COP30 represents the crucial turning point to fully mainstream food systems into climate action, an effort CGIAR and the FAO, alongside global partners, are seizing by providing the science, partnerships, and innovations necessary to make global adaptation and mitigation targets achievable and ready for finance. Key engagement tracks at COP30 will include advocating for robust targets for agriculture and food system resilience under the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), pushing for greater, critically needed investment in food systems transformation via the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG), and continuing to support concrete outcomes through the Sharm el-Sheikh Joint Work on Agriculture (SJWA). Furthermore, under Article 6.8 on Non-Market Approaches, CGIAR will present evidence on how solutions like agroecology and ecosystem-based cooperation can deliver equitable, sustainable climate progress beyond traditional carbon markets, reinforcing the collective belief that With Science We Can.

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