We are always going to have emissions from growing food. There is no way agriculture can get to zero emissions. More than any other industry climate change affects agriculture and agriculture effects climate change. Britt Groosman leads efforts to decrease the environmental footprint of food production at the Environmental defense Fund (https://www.edf.org/). The initial focus are the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, the United States, China, India, and Europe. Her team concentrates on understanding where emissions come from, how these emissions affect farmers, rural communities, broader society, and nature, then identifying big leverage points for change.  The first big leverage point is methane, especially livestock methane. Britt sees an urgent need to find practical ways of reducing methane emissions in the next 20 year.  “We are in a hurry here. We are not going to convince everybody to become vegan in the next five, or 10, or even 20 years, and maybe we don’t need to.” The challenges vary significantly across the different geopolitical landscapes. In India her team is developing partnerships with dairy cooperatives to provide advice and financing to millions of small holder farmers to increase productivity, improve livelihoods, and reduce their methane emissions. Digital technology is being deployed to decouple economic development from climate issues, helping enable India to avoid taking the high emitting pathway to economic development we made in the West. In the United States EDF has brought together and fostered uncomfortable partnerships that include Big Ag, The Farm Bureau, and other environmental groups to negotiate climate policy. This group, The Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance,  (https://agclimatealliance.com/) recently published 40 joint recommendations to the Farm Bill. These achievements have been based on a pragmatic approach that listens to their audience and does not try and advocate change without first walking a mile in the other person’s shoes.   Technology innovation alone is not a pathway to food sustainability, despite all the current energy, discussion, and investment in innovation.  Britt and her team have identified two additional gaps that need to be overcome. Firstly, without political will or the ambition to want to do things differently nothing will change. Despite the US Ministry of Defence identifying climate change as a near and imminent threat almost two decades ago, until quite recently climate change and agriculture were not discussed in the same sentence. Secondly, there is a huge implementation gap. In many cases we know what we need to do but we haven’t figured out how to incentivize the necessary behavioural change.  There is no one size fits all solution. “It’s really dangerous to look at just one indicator. Yes, we’re all in about climate, and yes, we can’t have it being to the detriment of other important factors such as community, social cohesion, environmental justice issues, biodiversity issues, etc.” Personally, Britt fees very deeply for the developing counties at sticky end of climate change. Frequently these countries did not create the pollution that is causing current levels of warming. She personally feels we need reduce emissions, invest in adaptation and that western world owes it to the global south to help them.  I recently caught up with Britt to hear more about her work, you can listen to the conversation here.