Food Systems - ForumforAg

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Michael Brückner, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors, Munich Re Investment Partners GmbH. Michael sees nature-positive investing as still early-stage but existential for his parent company, which depends on pricing climate and nature risk correctly. He argues nature-positive actions must be properly priced - not treated as pure cost - so benefits to third parties are reflected rather than left off balance sheets. The main gap, he says, isn't capital or will but consistent, shared risk standards (unlike credit ratings, sustainability ratings vary widely) and a clear, priced path for engagement.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Lauren Phillips, FAO's Director of Partnerships and UN Collaboration. Lauren reflects on her panel at the Forum’s Annual Conference about financing agricultural transition, arguing that progress requires tackling nutrition, productivity, climate and livelihoods together rather than in isolation, and expressing encouragement that climate and agriculture were discussed jointly, though she'd like to see more focus on social and nutrition outcomes. She frames climate change as an open-ended, generational crisis that intersects with conflict and resource pressures to drive hunger, and notes that declining climate finance budgets mean development funding alone won't suffice - private finance must also be de-risked to reach even the poorest smallholder farmers, who represent both high risk and high potential payoff. She closes by emphasising that building broad, durable consensus, even if slower, produces more lasting and ambitious outcomes than settling for quick fixes.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Nomindari Enkhtur, CEO of the Mongolian Nature's Legacy Foundation. They discuss her Forum Annual Conference talk on climate resilience, explaining that despite Mongolia's unique context, it faces the same core climate, environmental degradation and biodiversity challenges as elsewhere. Nomindari highlights the country's blended public-private financing model as one relevant solution. She describes the severe threat to Mongolia's nomadic communities, who face livestock loss and forced migration to cities as the country warms at twice the global average, and closes by invoking the Mongolian concept of the "eternal blue sky" as a call for greater collaboration in the face of shared dependence on nature.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Global Ambassador for the Club of Rome. Sandrine reflects on her Annual Conference panel on the converging food and energy crises, arguing food policy must centre citizens' lived experience - who consistently want affordable, nutritious, green food and greater localisation of production. She calls for protecting vulnerable farmers and citizens through windfall taxes on oil and gas profits, cutting fossil fuel subsidies, and direct financial support.

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Ethan Soloviev of HowGood. Ethan argues AI can help the agri-food system optimise holistically for climate, nature and farmer livelihoods, rather than trading them off. He's largely optimistic about AI despite concerns over energy, water use and emergent model behaviour, and sees it already speeding up decision-making on his own farm. He calls for AI trained on regenerative and agroecological data rather than industrial yield-focused data, so farmers help shape it themselves - and proposes a "moonshot" think tank using AI to build genuinely long-term plans for food and agriculture.