Consider the Human – Report from the Good Food Finance Data Forum

On Wednesday, March 26, 2025, CCI convened Part 1 of the Good Food Finance Network’s Data Systems Integration Forum. This virtual discussion forum focused on work needed to activate insights from the Good Food Finance Blueprint for Data Systems Integration, released last year.

The aim of this interactive forum is to establish parameters for early and advanced stage exploratory integrations of data systems operating through distinct technologies, covering different sectors, and spanning overlapping but differentiated timescales. We explored five core questions to bring forward insights from participants and guide plans for exploratory integration scenarios: 

1. What existing or emerging strategies should be employed to effectively integrate Earth systems science, agriculture-specific, and human development data into financial data platforms?
2. What core principles should govern this kind of integration of datasets, insight-sharing platforms, and other decision-support capacities?
3. Do local communities, especially subsistence and remote vulnerable communities, need support for business model innovation and technology deployment? 
4. Which multilateral processes provide opportunities for progress in 2025? Insights are welcome for UNFCCC meetings in Bonn and Belém, as well as the Financing for Development Conference, and other relevant venues.
5. How can food finance-related data systems integration avoid the likelihood of errors and other dysfunction that could emerge from the rapid spread of generative AI platforms?

A key question was the importance of linking nutrition security to food security. The emphasis on producing a sufficient amount of food to drive prices down has long-term effects that can make it harder to sustainably produce food and incentivize higher, instead of lower, prices. Emphasizing nutrition security can refocus policy, incentives, investments, and practices on more precise and value-building improvements—for human health, for the health and resilience of ecosystems, for national budgets, and for the overall economic opportunity linked to food systems.

Among the issues raised by participants and other contributors to the Integrated Data Systems Initiative: 

• Power imbalances drive many aspects of food systems, data-sharing, and the allocation of finance. Data can be a way to reduce the costly inefficiencies of income inequality, or it can exacerbate problematic divides in wealth, capacity, technology, and political influence. 
• Geopolitical risks need attention. Current trends toward increased military spending look likely to undermine foundational investments in human development, social services, and sustainability, at home and abroad. Multidimensional metrics could support more value-building allocation of resources. 
• Nutrition and health are vital to the wellbeing, opportunity, and security available to whole nations, now and into the future. Undervaluing affordable relaible access to nutrition, or excluding better health outcomes from investment criteria, create major distortions and hidden costs. 
• Transparency builds value. When too little is known about structural drivers, risks, and weaknesses, the overall resilience of national food systems is hard to quantify and hard to improve. Research into civil food resilience in the UK shows more information is needed to make proper risk and resilience decisions.
• Local benefits can drive national policy, investment, and success. Integrated data systems can be useful for precision translation of planetary health insights into concrete local decision insights, and corresponding opportunities to improve resilience, livelihoods, and outcomes.

The discussion opened with and provided new pratical insights around the Key Messages from the Blueprint: 

• Never before in human history has it been more important that we understand the extent of our impacts on the Earth system and its ecological life-supports.
• We need to develop data systems that are complex enough to not misrepresent the complexities of the living world, while producing integrated metrics that are easy to understand and act on, even for non-experts.
• The prevalence of affordable nutrition and good health shapes the overall quality of life and economic vibrancy of whole societies.
• Multidimensional metrics, based on integrated data systems, that provide summit to seabed health and resilience insights, can support new micro-, small-, and medium-sized businesses that diversify and revitalize local and rural economies.

A number of practical goals were put forward as areas of focus for exploratory integrations: 

• Better, more open, and more diversified information about quality of diets and specific health impacts and outcomes;
• Actionable insights for investors to better understand how nutrition security improves outcomes at the portfolio level;
• Innovations that allow key stakeholders, like sovereign wealth funds, to support improved resource allocation throughout the value chain;
• Linking food and health benefits to overall national development priorities, including GDP;
• Improved understanding of how drivers of conflict interact with and shape food systems, with applied insights reducing conflict risk and improving lives;
• Develop a typology of investor and instrument types, gather data, and involve public development banks, to accelerate impact. 

An important question was: What specific kinds of small-scale investment can serve local needs and make food system data services scalable and investable? 

• Public incentives have a role to play, and data are needed to support such incentives, like payments for ecosystem services. 
• Beyond this micro-, small-, and medium-scale enterprises can provide data-for-finance services that allow small farmers to benefit from being early adopters of health-building sustainable practices.
• Such new ventures can diversify rural economies and improve the quality and reliability of both data flows and financial delivery. 

The discussion also opened an important inquiry into the use of machine learning and other artificial intelligence applications for data analytics and decision-support services. This discussion will be further developed in future meetings and reports, including with service-providers developing some of these tools. We close today’s report with the principles listed in the Blueprint: 

1. Prioritize personal data security, accuracy and accountability, non-distortionary practical applications, and the rights and wellbeing of people over the inclination to deploy data systems to raise funds for commercial endeavors;
2. Treat that principled approach as the best way to provide strong evidence for both financial and non-financial return from integrated data systems designed to support good food finance mobilization and accountability;
3. Aim to limit AI usage in early exploratory integration to non-generative processing functions, to improve speed and reliability, not to tell new non-evidentiary stories about the underlying information; 
4. Consider the human element, including the need for direct human-scale benefits to producers, consumers, communities, to human health and the health of nature, and to create systems that have room for intermediary services. 

A closing thought, from today’s session: 

We can do much more with multilayered, multidimensional insights into the value-building aspects of our food systems. Public incentives and market incentives are not optimally attuned to this opportunity, so innovations should support local direct benefits, as well as scalability, and insights into the optimization of resource allocation.¹

Part 2 of this Data Systems Integration Forum will take place in September. In the meantime, we welcome further inputs from partners, allies, and newcomers to this discussion.

---

NOTES:

1. Across the Integrated Data Systems Initiative, we treat “optimization of resource allocation” as the enhanced delivery of health and resilience, across a wider landscape and/or population, and across multiple sectors or aims; in other words: more good for more people—including better planetary health outcomes—with comparable investment, labor, or technical support.