The next systemic shock may not erupt from the banking system or the energy markets. It may come from the soil beneath our feet.
According to the recently published EAT-Lancet Commission report, the global food system has become the single largest driver of planetary boundary transgressions and is responsible for roughly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Even if the world achieved a complete transition to clean energy, today’s food systems alone would still push the planet beyond the 1.5°C threshold. As Dr. Gunhild Stordalen, founder and executive chair of EAT, warned in an interview, “ignoring food is a failure to recognize a fundamental systemic risk.”
The balance sheet of that risk is stark. The food system generates around $10 trillion in annual value but imposes an estimated $15 trillion in hidden costs on the environment and society. Those costs include rising health burdens, lost productivity, degraded ecosystems, and public expenditures that strain national budgets. “Unless food is treated as the systemic asset it truly is,” Stordalen warns, “we will continue to expose the global economy to escalating climate, nature, and health risks.”
The report arrives at a time when food has re-emerged as a macroeconomic fault line. Droughts, floods, and fertilizer shortages have driven food prices to historic highs and exposed how vulnerable supply chains remain to climate volatility. Governments face rising subsidy bills and sovereign-risk exposure from food-price inflation, while investors are beginning to treat food security as a material financial risk.
While concern over breaching planetary boundaries has grown, the food system may be the overshoot no one’s pricing — and the defining economic story of the decade.
The Invisible Infrastructure Of The Global Economy
Every industry depends on a stable food system: it sustains the workforce, influences healthcare costs, underpins supply chains, and shapes the resilience of economies under stress. When food systems fail, every other system falters.
“Food underpins every industry because it sustains every worker and supply chain,” says Stordalen. “Unhealthy diets are a leading cause of avoidable deaths and chronic health conditions, driving significant costs across healthcare systems including reduced workforce participation and productivity.”
The report finds that shifting toward what it calls the Planetary Health Diet could prevent up to 15 million premature deaths each year, about 40,000 every day, while improving health, wellbeing, and workplace productivity. The shift, says Stordalen, delivers “clear benefits for both the workforce and public budgets.”
The global food economy’s externalities are not marginal but structural. Reducing those costs, Stordalen argues, “should be viewed as a strategy for economic growth and stability, not just a public health objective.”
Breaching Planetary Boundaries
The 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission builds on its 2019 predecessor with a sharper warning: food systems are now breaching at least five of the nine planetary boundaries that define Earth’s safe operating space. These are the environmental limits that keep the Earth system stable, thresholds for climate, biodiversity, land use, freshwater, and nutrient pollution
The Commission’s models show that without systemic transformation, combining dietary shifts, reduced food loss and waste, and ecological intensification, food production alone could derail global climate goals even under aggressive energy decarbonization. Breaching planetary boundaries risks triggering abrupt, irreversible shifts across interlinked systems from soil and water to pollinators, ocean currents, and ice sheets. As the planet warms beyond 1.4 °C, warm-water corals are already dying off, and models suggest that ice-sheet collapse or circulation shifts could cascade into climate volatility.
The Commission argues the imbalance is not only ecological but moral. Only about one percent of humanity lives within the “safe and just” food space where diets are both nutritionally adequate and environmentally sustainable. Nearly half the global population falls below key social foundations such as access to healthy food, a safe environment, and decent work, while the highest-consuming tiers drive most environmental damage. “A just transition must center both rights and responsibility,” says Stordalen. “Justice is not only the goal, it’s the engine of transformation.”
On the production side, the Commission calls for a significant reduction in ruminant meat production by 2050 and a 63% increase in the production of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. These shifts, combined with investment in circular nutrient systems and reduced waste, would lower emissions and ease pressure on land, water, and ecosystems, with only modest impacts on average food costs.
The impact on food costs will be critical: global food prices remain 25–30% higher than pre-pandemic averages. Fertilizer costs and climate-linked droughts have increased input volatility, while extreme weather has driven multi-billion-dollar losses across North American and European harvests in 2025.
The Mispricing Problem
Despite driving nearly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, the food sector receives less than five percent of climate finance. Only 4.3% of climate-related investment – around $28 billion annually – flows to food systems, and just 2.2% of total mitigation finance addresses agricultural emissions. It’s an extraordinary mismatch that leaves trillions in systemic risk unpriced.
According to the World Bank, to address this risk, investment in reducing food-system emissions must rise eighteen-fold to $260 billion per year by 2030. Yet capital continues to flow in the opposite direction. “Capital flows and policy incentives continue to support outcomes that breach planetary and social boundaries,” says Stordalen.
She frames the economics bluntly: transforming food systems would require $200 to $500 billion in annual investment but deliver around $5 trillion in annual benefits through avoided healthcare costs, productivity gains, and ecosystem recovery. “The economic benefits of transformation are an order of magnitude larger than the required investment,” she explains.
The gap reflects deep structural misalignments between capital and planetary health. Investors continue to reward short-term gains that obscure long-term liabilities, a distortion that hides trillions in unpriced risk and leaves economies exposed to cascading shocks across food, health, and climate.
From Market Failure To Financial Realignment
The EAT-Lancet Commission’s central prescription is financial realignment, restructuring the incentives, subsidies, and flows that currently reward degradation. “Existing public support and procurement can be redirected to incentivize ecological intensification, increase access to under-consumed healthy foods, and build circular supply chains,” says Stordalen. “At the same time, subsidies and incentives that promote polluting practices or the overproduction of foods linked to poor health should be phased out.”
Today, more than 80% of EU agricultural subsidies support emissions-intensive animal products. Redirecting that funding, she notes, would have faster impact than generating new revenue, provided the transition is carefully managed to avoid unintended harm to farmers and low-income communities.
“The missing catalyst is credible policy clarity, supported by household protections and investable pipelines that de-risk capital and align public funding with public goods,” she explains. When governments “set stable, science-based targets, bundle actions into clear roadmaps, and establish robust monitoring and accountability mechanisms, capital follows.”
Policy instruments such as the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), and science-based targets offer the frameworks investors need. Some asset managers and corporates are beginning to respond. Initiatives like FAIRR’s Protein Transition engagement and Ceres’ Food Emissions 50 are pressuring companies to disclose and reduce food-related emissions, signaling early movement toward pricing this systemic risk.
Central bank stress testing and strategic public co-investment could further mobilize private capital. Meanwhile, Stordalen emphasizes that “policy ambition must be matched by fairness, or the capital will not reach the places where it’s needed most.”
“A just transition means ensuring that healthy diets are accessible, affordable, and appealing in all regions, guaranteeing living wages and safe working conditions for food-system workers, protecting traditional, healthy diets, and securing meaningful participation so communities can shape the changes that affect them,” Stordalen says.
She argues that a just transition must be anchored in equity and participation, supported by concessional finance, targeted debt relief, and mechanisms that unlock private investment across all regions. A transition that excludes the poor or destabilizes rural livelihoods would fail both ethically and economically.
The Horizon Ahead
Imagine the global economy a decade from now. Governments embed food-system stability into fiscal planning and risk disclosure frameworks. Agricultural credit lines reward soil restoration and water stewardship. Pension funds carry exposure metrics for food-system risk, just as they now do for climate. Public procurement programs favor low-impact, nutrient-rich food. Investors recognize healthy, resilient food systems as essential infrastructure, comparable to energy, digital networks, and transport.
Achieving that vision, Stordalen argues, is not optional. Transforming food systems, she concludes, “is no longer philanthropy or policy aspiration. It’s the next test of whether finance can adapt fast enough to stay within Earth’s boundaries and within its own balance sheet.”
For investors and policymakers, the next decade may test whether markets can learn to price resilience as efficiently as they price risk. The food system’s balance sheet now spans both planetary and financial boundaries, and the question is no longer whether transformation is affordable, but whether delay still is.