COUNTDOWN REPORT THE FOOD SYSTEMS 2023  |  THE STATE OF FOOD SYSTEMS WORLDWIDE Recommended citation Food Systems Countdown Initiative. 2023. The food systems countdown report 2023: The state of food systems worldwide. New York: Columbia University; Ithaca: Cornell University; Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); Geneva: Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). https://doi.org/10.36072/fsci2023. Acknowledgments This report was written by Stella Nordhagen, Ty Beal, and Kate Schneider and reflects the work of the peer-reviewed publication co-authored by collaborators and colleagues of the Food Systems Countdown Initiative. Input was provided by Andrea Cattaneo, Piero Conforti, Francesco Tubiello, Patrick Webb, and the Food Systems Countdown Initiative co-chairs: Jessica Fanzo, Lawrence Haddad, Mario Herrero, and José Rosero Moncayo. Editing is by Heidi Fritschel. Graphic design is by Danielle DeGarmo. Photo credits: cover–page 1 © Unsplash; pages 2–3 © GAIN; page 5 © Images of Empowerment; pages 7–8 © GAIN; page 9 © Pexels; page 11 © GAIN; page 13 © Stella Nordhagen; page 14 © Unsplash: back cover © GAIN The report is based on the following peer-reviewed publication: Schneider, K.R., Fanzo, J., Haddad, L. et al. The state of food systems worldwide in the countdown to 2030. Nat Food 4, 1090–1110 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-023-00885-9 This work was funded by contributions from FAO, the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship program, and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The funders had no role in data analysis, report preparation, or the decision to publish. All authors had access to the data presented. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of Columbia University, Cornell University, FAO, or GAIN. © 2023 Columbia University, Cornell University, FAO, and GAIN This work is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 IGO license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 IGO; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Under the terms of this license, you may copy, redistribute, and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, provided the work is appropriately cited, as indicated above. In any use of this work, there should be no suggestion that the Food Systems Countdown Initiative, Columbia University, Cornell University, FAO, or GAIN endorses any specific organization, products, or services. No use of the organizations’ logos is permitted. If you adapt the work, then you must license your work under the same or equivalent Creative Commons license. C ONTACT www.foodcountdown.org Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) Rue de Varembé 7 1202 Geneva, Switzerland info@gainhealth.org www.gainhealth.org Executive summary Food systems are a foundation of human and planetary well-being and central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet they also contribute to ill health, inequity, environmental degradation, and greenhouse gas emissions. These challenges demand urgent food systems transformation. Such a transformation requires understanding the status of food systems across their diverse functions. The Food Systems Countdown Initiative (“the Countdown”) aims to enable this understanding by monitoring the state of food systems transformation through relevant data, independent of any established monitoring processes. Such monitoring can help align decision makers around key priorities, incentivize action, hold stakeholders accountable, sustain commitment by demonstrating progress, and enable course corrections. The Countdown is an interdisciplinary collaboration of scientists that emerged from the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit. Over a two-year process, the collaboration developed a framework to monitor food systems that includes five themes: (1) diets, nutrition, and health; (2) environment, natural resources, and production; (3) livelihoods, poverty, and equity; (4) governance; and (5) resilience. The Countdown then used a rigorous, multistakeholder process to arrive at 50 indicators to monitor change across these five themes. The 50 indicators provide a comprehensive yet concise picture of food systems. They also reveal data gaps that need to be filled for better future food systems monitoring. This fir