Food Systems Countdown Initiative - Regional Expert Consultation
Hybrid Event, 25/05/2022
With less than a decade left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the global community faces a critical juncture to transform food systems to be healthier, safer, more sustainable, more efficient, and more equitable.
The UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 generated global attention on food systems and set the stage for food system transformation.
On 25 May from 8:30 hours to 13:00 (CEST), FAO will organize a Regional expert consultation of the Food Systems Countdown Initiative’s Indicator framework for the Europe and Central Asia region (all countries in the region). The expert consultation will bring together representatives from governments from the region, as well as individual experts in food systems from the FAO network in countries.
It is widely recognized that enhancing all aspects of food systems and their interactions, a clear, rigorous, and comprehensive set of metrics and indicators are required to guide decision-makers and to hold them accountable. However, currently no rigorous mechanism exists to track the state of food systems, their change, and performance over time.
With the ultimate objective to fill this gap, the Food Systems Countdown Initiative was formed in a partnership between FAO, GAIN, and Johns Hopkins University in 2021 as a comprehensive, independent, inclusive, science-based mechanism to provide actionable evidence to track progress, guide decision-makers, and inform transformation.
The initiative will deliver a set of indicators in an inclusive way and part of the development of the indicators will be a series of regional consultations organized by FAO.
The outcome of the upcoming regional consultation will be a public document summarizing the inputs received on the relevance, usefulness, and validity of the proposed set of indicators to the policy decision-making process in each of five thematic areas that the indicator framework covers.
The informal consultation will take place in a virtual zoom format, with simultaneous interpretation in English and Russian.