ProVeg’s International UN policy team was in Nairobi for the seventh session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-7), bringing a busy and influential policy year to a close.
UNEA-7 marked the final major engagement of the year for the team and provided a moment to take stock of months of sustained work across the global-food and climate-policy spaces. This included the June Climate Meetings in Bonn, where ProVeg launched the Belém Declaration on plant-rich diets, followed by the UNFSS+4 Stocktaking Moment in July, and the Africa Food Systems Forum and New York Climate Week in September.
All of that steady build-up fed directly into COP30, where the team took part in several side events and supported the launch of The Diets Toolkit: An NDC and NBSAPs Guide for Healthy and Sustainable Diets, alongside other research and policy initiatives. Read more about our COP30 work here, and here!
UNEA-7 brought these various threads together and provided a strong platform to continue working with governments, partners, and fellow stakeholders.
Putting food systems on the UNEA-7 agenda
Since spring, ProVeg has been actively involved in a range of policy discussions and negotiation processes that came to a head at UNEA-7, including work around the Ministerial Declaration and several resolutions.
On the opening day of the two-week high-level summit, ProVeg and partners hosted an in-person side event focused on the role of consumption and food-system policies in delivering environmental goals.
The session, titled Better resilience through better consumption and production: agri-food policy pathways and measures for achieving more sustainable lifestyles and thriving ecosystems, explored why food-system transformation needs to be treated as a core, cross-cutting issue within UN environmental processes. Several clear themes emerged from the discussion:
Food systems were highlighted as central to the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. Addressing these challenges means changing not only how food is produced, but also how it is consumed. Madagascar, for example, shared how it is integrating sustainable food consumption measures into its national biodiversity strategy and action plan (NBSAP).
Speakers also stressed that fairness and human rights must sit at the center of policy design. Without tackling cost barriers, power imbalances, and the lived realities of financially stretched consumers and economically vulnerable producers, sustainable diets will remain out of reach for many people.
The importance of policy coherence and coordination across government was another strong message. Brazil shared examples from its Multilevel Governance system (SISAN) and Food Acquisition Program (PAA), which uses public procurement to support family farmers.
Looking ahead to UNEA-8, panelists emphasized the need to better reflect consumers’ needs across the entire food chain, from purchasing choices through to end-of-life considerations, in both national and global decision-making.
Food systems recognized in the Ministerial Declaration
After months of engagement with governments, ProVeg welcomed the explicit reference to food systems in the UNEA-7 Ministerial Declaration. This high-level political statement, adopted at the close of the Assembly, will help shape priorities for global environmental action.
The declaration calls on countries to “accelerate the transition towards sustainable food systems in line with the 2030 Agenda, emphasizing the importance of a multisectoral and integrated approach for achieving global food security and eradicating poverty while addressing environmental challenges and crises”.
Its inclusion reflects growing political momentum around food-system transformation and the recognition that production and consumption must be addressed together.
GEO-7 strengthens the case for change
The recently released GEO-7 report from the UN Environment Program reinforces this direction. As UNEP’s flagship assessment document, GEO-7 identifies food-system transformation as one of four system-wide changes needed to tackle global environmental challenges, alongside systemic transformations in the financial, energy, and minerals sectors.
The report sets out a range of practical solutions, covering sustainable production, circular approaches, and concerns around consumption. These include shifting towards healthy and sustainable diets with greater consumption of plant-based foods, as well as accelerating the development and uptake of novel alternative proteins, including cultivated meat.
Looking ahead
UNEA-7 closes a significant chapter in ProVeg’s UN policy work, while also setting the scene for what comes next. Attention is already turning towards 2026, when all three Rio Conventions will meet later in the year: the climate change COP event in Türkiye, the biodiversity COP in Armenia, and the desertification COP in Mongolia.
With another full year of international engagement ahead, ProVeg will continue pushing for sustainable food systems to sit at the heart of environmental policy discussions worldwide.
Learn more about our UN Policy work here.
Simon Middleton
Senior Writer
