Shaping Sustainable Food Systems: Insights from the 2025 FOLUR Workshop

On October 22–23, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) hosted the 2025 FOLUR workshop in Paris, bringing together partners including the World Bank, FAO, and WRI, to discuss progress in four themes crucial to aligning global food systems with nature-positive and climate-resilient goals: Restoration, Biodiversity and Agriculture, National Commitments and Actions, and Sustainable Trade.

FOLUR — a seven-year initiative funded by the Global Environment Facility and led by the World Bank — seeks to transform food and land use systems through a global knowledge platform and 27 country projects. Country-level work focuses on accelerating action in landscapes and value chains for eight major commodities, including livestock, cocoa, coffee, maize, palm oil, rice, soy, and wheat. Within the SDSN, the FABLE and FELD teams have contributed to the FOLUR global platform over the past four years. The workshop provided space to reflect on what has been achieved, explore how new tools can advance restoration and biodiversity objectives, and discuss what can be done together in the coming years.

Participatory Approaches to Large-Scale Landscape Restoration

In the opening session on Restoration, Patrick Kalas (FAO: Lead on Knowledge, Learning and Systemic Capacity Development for the FAO-GEF portfolio) highlighted the transformative potential of restoration in reshaping food systems — stressing that restoration is not only an ecological process, but a social one, shaped by governance and participation:

“A landscape is an interaction between different land uses as well as people, who may have different interests, values, and identities — so it's not enough to focus only on the biophysical elements. When we consider how that landscape should be managed or planned, we need to include all of them, both in the discussions that define the plan and in the governance structures that actually oversee its management.”

Importantly, he emphasized the role of Participatory Informed Landscape Approaches (PILA) in guiding integrated landscape management. By engaging governments and communities, and by setting measurable indicators that include both ecological and socio-economic factors, these approaches ensure that restoration efforts are equitable and sustainable. The goal is to diversify production while generating multiple ecological and socio-economic benefits.

Tesfay Woldemariam (WRI: GIS & RS Research Associate), originally from Ethiopia, illustrated this approach in practice at the workshop. In a process central to achieving Ethiopia’s Vision 2030, WRI and the Ministry of Environment used the Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM) to identify over 82 million hectares — about 73% of Ethiopia’s total land area — as zones viable for landscape restoration. Speaking about the critical role of local engagement in this process, he said:

“Governments, local governments in Ethiopia especially, do a good job mobilizing communities… Every district identifies areas for restoration, then the community mobilizes and creates consensus — this is like social tensing. Once they agree upon it, they don't destroy it.”

In regions like Tigray’s Azbe area, this grassroots approach has been transformative.

Woldemariam highlighted the hope these transformations generate locally:

"It's really a mass movement, not a project. When land degradation is too much for the rural community, it's like the 2008 bankruptcy here. That's their bank, because they depend on the land for everything — food, shelter, everything… If that is gone, their livelihood is gone. So, it is transformative, really.

If communities see change, it has a natural way of expanding. There is this relay of information: ‘Oh, we can actually change our lives.’ So, there is hope — maybe we don't have a choice but to do something about it."

Ethiopia’s example illustrates how participatory approaches, rigorous data, and local engagement can drive large-scale restoration with lasting ecological and economic benefits. The ROAM assessment findings now guide national interventions, with the project having been recognized by AFR100 and IUCN and replicated as a model in 26 countries.

Progress to Integrate Local, National, and Global Scales in FABLE

Thanks to the FOLUR project, the FABLE team at SDSN has made progress on several fronts. New modelling tools have been developed to connect local, national, and global scales by complementing the FABLE Calculator with a spatially explicit module and a global trade economic model.

Guilherme Iablovonsky (SDSN: Geospatial Data Scientist, SDG Transformation Center) presented the Google Earth app he built to facilitate integration of maps into the FABLE modelling tools by non-GIS experts. Building on this and on DownscalR, a tool developed at IIASA, Clara Douzal (SDSN: FABLE Research Analyst) showed how the new spatial module can be used to test the impact of alternative territorial restoration strategies simultaneously on biodiversity, climate, and food security strategies.

Aline Mosnier (SDSN: FABLE Scientific Director) showed the progress achieved in modeling bilateral trade using a global spatial price equilibrium model and in computing the evolution of the GHG footprint for selected commodities depending on the actions taken by producing countries, drawing on Scenathon 2023 results. Thanks to future projections of bilateral trade flows, FABLE country teams will be able to assess their consumption footprint for their overall food consumption or for specific commodities.

Susan Cesar de Oliveira (University of Brasilia, IIS: Associate Professor) showed how the EU and UK deforestation-free supply chain regulations could impact Brazil and how this differs across sectors. Neus Escobar (BC3: Research Fellow) presented AgroSCAN, a new global input-output database designed to track agri-food supply chains using data from FAOSTAT and GLEAM. This database enables a far more comprehensive analysis of past and current food and feed flows, as well as the environmental and economic impacts embodied in global food demand. Both presentations were a great inspiration for future FABLE work.

Turning Commitments Into Action

Duncan Okowa (WRI: Research Associate) presented the Landscape Policy Accelerator, WRI’s main tool to strategically partner with governments to translate commitments into action by strengthening enabling conditions and critical public incentives. Thanks to FOLUR support, workshops have been organized in Indonesia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Malawi, resulting in tailored solutions ranging from developing tree material reproduction strategies to establishing national frameworks for payments for ecosystem services.

On the FELD side, Kotone Yamamoto (SDSN: FELD Consultant Policy Analyst) presented work that reviewed the Biennial Transparency Report (BTR) system under the Paris Agreement’s Enhanced Transparency Framework. BTRs can be powerful tools for tracking adaptation, identifying financing gaps, and turning commitments into action. Cecil Haverkamp (SDSN: FELD Director) then explained the Nature Action Tracker (NAT) with which he closely collaborates with WWF International.

Ruth Nyamasege (Kenya Ministry of Environment, Climate Change & Forestry, NDC Partnership facilitator) reminded participants of the importance of anchoring the NDC process in a broader policy and legal framework — in Kenya’s case, Vision 2030, the Mid-Term Plans, and the National Climate Change Action Plan. In Kenya, while agriculture is not the top mitigation priority, it is critical for adaptation and offers potential co-benefits for mitigation. Kenya has also set a target of achieving 30% tree cover across its territory, but the availability of reliable land cover and land cover change data remains a challenge.

Looking Ahead

Peter Goodman (World Bank: Program Manager, FOLUR Global Knowledge Platform) called for reframing biodiversity not as competing with production, but as foundational to the ecosystem services that sustain it. Strengthening research on agrobiodiversity and the economic benefits of sustainable practices is key to helping governments and funders recognize biodiversity as a core investment priority. As he noted, growing awareness is beginning to influence decision-making, allowing change to take root.

"You start to hear people in positions of power talk about this, where this simply wasn't even in their vocabulary before... It might take a little bit of time, but it's certainly moving up the agenda."

Similarly, the French Agency of Development (AFD) also shared insights from its work to better integrate biodiversity into economic decision-making. Marjolaine Cour and Anne Chetaille shared how this is done on the ground, while Antoine Godin presented AFD’s approach to modeling the interactions between biodiversity, society, and production systems, illustrating the negative ripple effects of environmental degradation and biodiversity pressures across economies.

This growing recognition of the importance of biodiversity will continue to shape discussions in the months ahead. In December, the World Bank will release a new report titled Agriculture Rooted in Biodiversity, further contributing to the global conversation on how biodiversity underpins sustainable food systems. Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT is working together with the World Bank on this topic. Sarah Jones (Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT: Scientist and part of the FABLE Secretariat) adds:

"There is active policy interest in understanding how to integrate biodiversity into land use planning decisions both on and off-farm, and in having practical ways to monitor outcomes particularly to report on national commitments to the Global Biodiversity Framework."

Across all sessions, participants shared a sense of optimism. The workshop reaffirmed that with continued knowledge sharing, integrated tools, and participatory approaches, countries can make meaningful progress toward resilient, biodiversity-friendly, and climate-positive food systems.

Achieving these goals will require connecting global ambitions with context-specific solutions. Collective action, capacity building, and shared learning will be essential for sustaining momentum and translating global commitments into local action.