Tools and Databases
The Food Sustainability Index (FSI)
The Food Sustainability Index (FSI) is a global study on nutrition, agriculture, and food waste and includes 38 indicators and 95 sub-indicators. 2021 covers 78 countries with geographic representation across the world, representing 92% of global GDP and 92% of the global population with a mix of high-income, middle-income, and low-income economies. The tool sheds light on the progress countries are making on the path to a more sustainable food system and can highlight how food sustainability can help to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the objectives of the Paris Agreement to combat climate change and accelerate moves to a low-carbon future.
Access the tool here to download heat maps, country scores, and profiles. You can filter by country, region, or income to personalise your data.
Food Systems Economics Commission
The MAgPIE Model and TELL Us model are two tools developed by the Food Systems Economics Commission in their endeavours to support political and economic decision-makers with tools and evidence to shift food and land-use systems.
The questions they strive to answer include ‘how do food systems perform today on health, environment, inclusion, and resilience? What are the real costs of today’s food and land use systems?’ and more. Answering these questions will remain challenging without frameworks, and tools that integrate evidence, focus on systems settings, and provide accessible and actionable information.
The MagPie Model
The Model of Agricultural Production and its Impact on the Environment (MAgPIE) looks at the global food system, the potential behaviours of consumers and producers, including the resulting feedback loops on the earth’s organic evolution. This includes greenhouse gas production, livestock, and crop yields. It depicts the complexity of today’s food system that is home to a growing world population exerting significant pressure on natural processes and aims to support decision making that reverses this trend.
The TELL Us Model
TELLUS is an Agent-Based Model (ABM) being applied to food and land-use systems. It is used to capture tipping points and identify policy levers that hold the potential to encourage regenerative agricultural practices that simultaneously increase resilience to future shocks.
TELLUS offers the unique opportunity to study how information flows, constraints, costs, and behavioural differences shape the effectiveness of policy interventions.’
UNICEF – Innocenti Framework on Food Systems for Children and Adolescents
‘Food systems are made up of and connected by people and are influenced by their decisions. Actors across food supply chains and food environments, and children, adolescents, and their caregivers, play an important role in assuring the diets of children and adolescents. As such, they are central actors in a food systems approach and in the food system framework for children and adolescents.’
The Innocenti Framework showcases the bi-directional relationships and feedback loops between food systems drivers and determinants (food supply chains, external food environments, personal food environments and behaviours of caregivers, children, and adolescents). These interact and influence individuals’ access to healthy, affordable, and sustainable diets.
Read UNICEF’s Food System Brochure to learn more about the structural factors that influence the functionality of food systems, including the processes and conditions that are necessary to improve the diets of children and adolescents.
The Global Farm Metric
The Global Farm Metric (GFM) supports and empowers farmers to make sustainable decisions and to measure their farm's impact on the environment, economy, and society. It is a harmonised, time-saving, adaptable, and evidence-based tool created in collaboration with farmers, organisations, and experts. The tool consists of 11 categories of sustainability (incl. soil, water, air and climate, productivity). Individuals using the tool are asked to do a series of calculations and to benchmark their practices against others to produce a score for each of these categories.
They also serve a pivotal role to hold governments accountable and knowledgeable on the systems of production to incentivise in their communities, and to influence sources of products bought by food companies.
Learn more here.
The TEEBAgriFood Evaluation Framework
The TEBBAgriFood Evaluation Framework was developed in 2018 through a collaboration involving 150 multidisciplinary scholars in 33 countries, and to guide the evaluation of ‘food systems and their complex linkages to the environment, society, and human health’. The framework supports better-informed decision-making by using a systems approach and making it harder for policymakers to ignore pertinent relationships that the eco-agri-food system has with our environment and health. It can be used to determine the purpose of an evaluation, the entry point of analysis and to guide reporting and communication of findings, and more.
Learn more about the TEEBAgriFood initiative and framework here.
INFORMAS
INFORMAS (International Network for Food and Obesity / Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs) Research, Monitoring and Action Support) is a global network of public-interest organisations and researchers that aims to monitor, benchmark and support public and private sector actions to increase healthy food environments and reduce obesity and NCDs and their related inequalities.
The network supports the fulfilment of WHO’s Global Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases (2013-2020) and contributes to expansion of the World Cancer Research Fund International NOURISHING framework.
‘The INFORMAS framework comprises two ‘process’ modules, that monitor the policies and actions of the public and private sectors, seven ‘impact’ modules that monitor the key characteristics of food environments and three ‘outcome’ modules that monitor dietary quality, risk factors and NCD morbidity and mortality. Monitoring frameworks and indicators have been developed for 10 modules to provide consistency, but allowing for stepwise approaches (‘minimal’, ‘expanded’, ‘optimal’) to data collection and analysis.’
The data compiled across partner organisations will strengthen food environment benchmarking, monitoring of progress over time, and reinforce the accountability required to address overweight obesity, NCDs and health inequalities.