Averting dangerous climate change, feeding and providing sustainable livelihoods for a growing global population, and creating space for nature – that is the triple challenge of our time.

This series of sessions will feature diverse perspectives on how to balance responses to address these challenges, specifically looking at the need for integrated approaches to address the main drivers of habitat loss, including deforestation, and how diets around the world are impacting the environment.

Session 1: Integrated solutions to adapt to a changing world

The COVID-19 pandemic combined with the impact of record fires around the world is showing how connected humans are to nature, its resources and biodiversity. Land use change, including deforestation, is a key driver of emerging infectious diseases. To prevent the next pandemic, it is critical to transform our relationship with nature.

This session will present new science on the changing drivers of deforestation and dive into integrated solutions that are needed to ensure human and planetary well-being.

Session 2: Scaling up solutions to address the triple challenge

The Triple Challenge raises difficult questions for decision-makers and stakeholders. In particular, how can we encourage scale-up of known solutions, such as reducing food waste, and also resolve remaining trade-offs between climate mitigation, food and biodiversity restoration priorities? To find acceptable and context-specific answers to this question, we need good processes for consideration of complex political, social, economic, cultural and environmental factors and perspectives.

The purpose of this session is to help generate recommendations that can support such processes. The session will draw on inputs from different stakeholders – including international organisations, local communities and the private sector – and on ideas from the audience, and will feed into the development of Triple Challenge recommendations and tools.

Session 3: Food for thought: The role of diets in improving human and planetary health

Meeting the dietary needs of a growing global population while averting dangerous climate change and safeguarding nature is one of the biggest challenges of our time. This session will feature a presentation on the potential benefits dietary shifts in over 100 countries could have on national-level human and environmental health, and how national dietary guidelines could be optimised to improve planetary health. There will be a panel discussion on how these shifts can be best achieved, with conservation, nutrition and farming experts looking at some of the solutions for a more sustainable and resilient food system.