WEF Ag Report: It’s a Problem of Fragmentation

The World Economic Forum’s January 2024 report; 100 Million Farmers: Breakthrough Models for Financing a Sustainability Transition sounded an alarm that global food systems need to shift rapidly to more sustainable forms of production by 2030.

It also states existing programs are fragmented.

Fragmented Initiatives

The WEF report states that existing programs have gaps that do not include all the elements of a breakthrough strategy.

The gaps include; 1) no program provides the full stack of services, 2) no initiative monetizes the full set of ecosystem services, 3) initiatives are not set up to aggregate the investment needed, 4) initiatives are able to mobilize the full set of actors needed, and 5) they lack sufficient finance capability to underpin the collaboration required.

Roadmap to Drive a Step-Change?

The WEF Roadmap plan is to “identify and build upon existing initiatives with the potential to fully implement all model elements.”

Moving forward on existing efforts often feels the most natural and productive, but an unintended consequence of building on fragmented efforts is that it creates deeper and wider gaps.

When you push on a bunch of disconnected pieces, they generally become more, not less fragmented.

2024: Build Forward or Step Back?

With just six annual growing cycles left before 2030, it takes a lot of self discipline to take a step back to assess where the regenerative movement is at.

Financial capital is impatient and the report says, globally, the food system transformation needs an additional $300 billion to $350 billion in capital investment annually through 2030. If we take a step back, how much money will remain on the sidelines? If we don’t step back and assess the situation, will we remain fragmented?

Defragmented on the Farm

As a farmer, I have no choice but to have an integrated production system. I produce provisional, regulating, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services simultaneously on the same parcel of land using a common management system.

Nature is an integrated system. It is the human strategy that fragments nature and its outputs so it “fits” into economic model we use.

Is the Economy a Subset of the Ecology?

What if the economy really is the subset of the ecological systems? If so, then would we need to “fit” the economic system into the ecological systems? Would an economist be charged with blasphemy for such a suggestion?

What if the “breakthrough strategy” is an acceptance that we can’t “program” our way forward to a solution. What if the “breakthrough strategy” was far more economically fundamental than just more and bigger programs? What if we had to create the economic model based on the integrated model that nature uses?

What if that made more sense than to fragment the values we seek?

Integrating Nature, the Farm, and the Economy

A breakthrough strategy is about accepting and maintaining nature and the integration of provisional, regulating, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services as they occur on the farm. It is the wisdom we need now.

As John Morrison stated, “Knowledge comes by taking things apart, but wisdom comes by putting things together.”

We have taken ecosystem services apart for the last two decades and have learned a lot. But we still lack the wisdom of how to put it together and solve the issue of landscape sustainability and food production.

Adding an Ecological Dimension to the Economy

A first step is creating wisdom is to add an ecological dimension to the economy. That is essentially what the 1000s of programs are attempting to do in their own fragmented way. But we have reached the maximum ROI via the fragmented strategy. Every new program makes an incremental gain in the short term, while creating a more fragmented model that becomes less sustainable in the long term.

EcoCommerce and the NCU

On our farm, I can account for the entirety of natural capital and the full suite of provisional, regulating, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services using an integrated NCU (natural capital unit) accounting system. That means I use the same accounting system for corn production as carbon sequestration and water quality and pollination, and….whatever ecosystem service of the imagination.

My neighbor could use this same NCU accounting system and so could my colleagues in Europe, Africa, and Australia. It is the only natural capital accounting system designed to do this from a practitioners, rather than a policymaker’s perspective.

The NCU accounting system would close the gaps to 1) account for the full stack of services, 2) monetize the full set of ecosystem services, 3) aggregate the investment needed, 4) mobilize the full set of actors needed, and 5) underpin the collaboration required for acquiring the financing.

Rapid Shift to Partnerships, Equity, Accountability, and Governance

Any type of unified rapid shift has to occur at a fundamental level. Programs cannot shift in unison as their foundations are fragmented. An NCU foundation will enable a shift to occur at the governance level, where a shift has to occur to change any socio-economic system. And to shift governance, you need a catalyst to shift accounting. And farmers will shift to a landowner-centric, landowner-governed accounting system that integrates provisional, regulating, supporting, and cultural ecosystem services.

Fragmentation Leads to Wicked Problems

Humans are problem solvers. But solving problems in a fragmented manner leads to the development of bigger wicked problems. Wicked problems are solved by defragmented what society has already fragmented.

Integration Leads to Wicked Solutions

The wisdom of Nature, the great integrator, is the teacher we need at this moment in history. It is a humbling time in our history to recognize that for centuries we have dismantled nature to create great knowledge to solve many “a” problems.

Now we have to learn from Nature to solve “the” problem.

Author

Timothy Gieseke has managed parallel careers in landscape management, policy, science, economics, and governance since the turn of the century. In the early 2000s, he had a solid understanding of the inherent limitations of emerging ecosystem service markets. In response he took a path that made sense to him as a practitioner while meeting the needs of the government, NGO, and private sectors.

In addition to the dozens of local, state, regional, and natural efforts he was involved in, he explained his findings in three books that addressed the environmental, socio-economic, and governance aspects of this emergent economy he named EcoCommerce®.

He explains how to address this wicked problem in detail in his three books:

EcoCommerce 101: Adding an ecological dimension to the economy (2011) This book covers the conservation movement history in USA and assesses the emerging and immature eco-markets. Written before knowledge of crypto, Gieseke prophetically stated that a “new coin” will be needed to address the complexity of eco-markets. The book concludes by describing the micro-ecocommerce and macro-ecocommerce parameters of this natural capital-based economic system and the ways it could emerge.

Shared Governance for Sustainable Working Landscapes (2016)

This book introduced the NCU (natural capital unit) as the catalyst for shared governance and natural capital accounting. Using a dozen case studies, the book examines how governance actors and governance styles influence the design and delivery of programs and markets. As an accounting unit, the NCU creates an interoperable platform for the suite of ecosystem services.

Collaborative Environmental Governance Frameworks: A practical guide (2019)

This book demystifies collaborative governance by using an assessment model based on four governance actors and three governance styles. The model uniquely describes the nearly infinite variations of governance frameworks. With this model, a meta-governor can foresee governance conflicts as well as apply the right mix of governance to specific types of problems, whether they are technical, scientific, political, or social (wicked) problems.