Aotearoa Circular
Food System Report
The Report & Findings
The food system contributes to almost 50% of greenhouse (GHG) emissions of Aotearoa New Zealand with dairy cattle and sheep the biggest contributors (MfE, 2023). Globally, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2023) provides some startling facts about the food system:
Globally we have degraded a third of our agricultural land
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It takes 1,000 years to build 3cm of topsoil
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It has been claimed we have 60 harvests left globally (annual) - see note on soil health in Opportunity Area 3
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95 of our food comes from soil
About the Report
This report feeds into a larger project to develop a Circular Economy and Bioeconomy (CEBE) strategy as an action in the Government’s Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP). The aim of this report is to focus on the food system and explore the Impacts, Barriers, and Enablers for a Circular Economy (CE).
The research will help identify:
The most important or impactful ways in which Aotearoa New Zealand can shift to a more circular low emissions economy in the food sector
How to manage the risk of negative outcomes in the food sector
How to realise opportunities that may arise in the food sector
The research is grounded in a Mātauranga Māori systems approach. Both Mātauranga Māori and a systems approach take a ‘whole systems’ view of complex challenges, seeking to identify and understand underlying structural drivers. To ensure a systems view, the Multi-Level Perspective Framework (MLP) is used as it is one of the most well researched frameworks to understand the dynamics of large-scale system transition. Moreover, we utilise a Doughnut Economics framework to understand current environmental and social overshoots of the food system.