© World Resources Institute

On September 13th, an alliance of forward-looking companies and hospitals, that  together serve 60 million meals annually, committed to reducing their food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2030. Climate Focus has cooperated over the last year with the World Resources Institute (WRI), UN Environment, and the Carbon Neutral City Alliance in the development of the Cool Food Pledge, which invites cities, companies, hospitals, universities and other facilities to raise their climate ambition and reduce their food-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the next year Climate Focus and WRI will seek to expand the founding cohort of pledge signatures to reach a total of one billion served meals under the pledge by September 2019. Climate Focus helped co-develop the initiative and remains key partner in bringing it forward.

The goals of the pledge build, among others, on our ongoing work to reduce meat consumption in order to mitigate climate change. Direct emissions from livestock account for 5% of global emissions, and are as high as 14.5% of all anthropogenic emissions if indirect emissions sources are considered.

Together with the Climate and Land Use Alliance, we are working to establish more sustainable diets through shifting to plant-based protein sources. Our work over the past year has included developing strategies to reduce beef consumption in the highest consumer nations; collaborating on various partners in developing proposals on how to implement those strategies and mapping of donors working on sustainable diets globally.