When it comes to food waste and climate change, Ecuador and Mexico are forging compelling paths toward solutions. In Mexico, a carbon tax and a new law addressing food waste and the right to food are strong first steps. In Ecuador, the innovative voluntary verification program, Programa Ecuador Carbono Cero (Zero Carbon Program), or PECC, establishes a regulatory framework to incentivize emissions reduction programs, laying the foundation for impactful national action.

New research from O Atlas Global de Políticas de Doação de Alimentos details how lawmakers in Ecuador and Mexico can strengthen these efforts and reduce food insecurity, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and strengthen community resilience through a suite of policies that use economic instruments — specifically incentives or penalties — to target food loss and waste.

The two separate pieces of research explore the role of food recovery in mitigating climate change in each country and the potential for economic policy opportunities to support food donation and food waste reduction. Up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food that ends up in landfills. When food decomposes, it creates methane, a greenhouse gas that traps more than 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over the first 20 years.

Food recovery and redistribution — the expertise of food banks across the world — is not only an effective way to address food insecurity; it’s the quickest, simplest, and most affordable way to reduce methane emissions.

“While food banks have been recovering and redistributing food to support their local communities for decades, our research increasingly proves that food banks have an important impact on mitigating methane emissions,” said Ana Catalina Suárez Peña, senior director of strategy and innovation at The Global FoodBanking Network. “Stronger national policies can help scale the work of food banks, multiplying their positive impacts on food security and the planet.”

The recent Atlas recommendations focus mainly on economic instruments that policymakers in Ecuador and Mexico could use to focus on methane mitigation. These economic instruments include carbon taxes, carbon offsets and food waste deterrence laws. The reports also recommend actions that incentivize food recovery from agricultural producers. These action opportunities provide a starting point for policymakers to build on and strengthen existing methane emissions policies.

“The partnership between the Food Law and Policy Clinic and The Global FoodBanking Network, powered by the Global Methane Hub, is yielding critical insights into how we can leverage food recovery to tackle both climate change and food insecurity,” said Emily Broad Leib, founding director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School.

Broad Leib added that what is particularly powerful is the focus on actionable policy recommendations, like those detailed in the Atlas.

“While our broader Global Food Donation Policy Atlas covers an array of laws impacting food donation, from food safety to liability protections for food donations, these white papers explore other policy areas that use economic instruments to either deter food waste, such as food waste deterrence laws, or incentivize food recovery or donation, such as tax incentives or carbon offsets, tailored to the specific contexts of countries like Mexico and Ecuador,” she said. “By bringing food recovery organizations to the policy table, we can ensure that these recommendations translate into real-world impact, creating a more sustainable and equitable food system for all. It’s about creating a comprehensive policy landscape that empowers food recovery to simultaneously address hunger and mitigate the damaging effects of methane emissions.”

Launched in 2019, the Atlas is a partnership between the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC) and The Global FoodBanking Network (GFN) that addresses the most pressing legal questions and barriers to food waste reduction and food donation around the world. The Atlas produces country reports — 25 and counting — as well as policy issue briefs, highlighting model policy and key considerations across nine topics.

The latest Atlas research is funded by the Global Methane Hub (GMH), the same organization that funded GFN’s Recuperação de alimentos para evitar emissões de metano, or FRAME, methodology — which was piloted in Ecuador and Mexico and is complemented by the findings of today’s reports on economic instruments in Ecuador and Mexico.

Measuring Methane Mitigation

The FRAME methodology quantifies and tracks, in real time, the methane emissions prevented via food recovery by food banks. Developed with the Carbon Trust, this is the first methodology for methane using the Microsoft Sustainability Manager tool. FRAME provides credible evidence that food banks help reduce emissions as well as food insecurity, and — like the Atlas recommendations — can help countries achieve their climate goals while also reducing food insecurity.

From July through September of 2023, methane mitigation results were captured via the Microsoft Sustainability Manager platform for selected GFN member food banks in Mexico and Ecuador. In those three months, the six food banks recovered more than 7.5 million kilograms of food, preventing 199 tonnes of methane from entering the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent of more than 4,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

“During the first phase, we worked with the food banks to work out the kinks and ensure the FRAME methodology was thorough and delivering high-quality results for food banks,” said Suárez Peña, who led the development of the methodology. “As we move to the next phase, we are confident we have a tool that allows food banks to measure their climate impact like never before.”

After the success of the pilot phase, the project will expand to GFN member food banks in Colombia, Costa Rica, Côte d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, South Africa and Thailand, as well as another food bank in Ecuador.

Additionally, GFN was selected as one of 15 organizations that will participate in Microsoft’s Tech for Social Impact Hack4Good 3.0, an innovative competition designed to empower nonprofits through artificial intelligence. GFN will be creating an AI-driven assistant to support food banks using the Microsoft Sustainability Manager platform for use of the FRAME methodology and other resources.

As GFN’s methane mitigation project continues to grow, food banks and other organizations that recover and redistribute surplus food can better prove the efficacy of their actions to mitigate methane. As highlighted in the recently released reports on economic instruments, the robust data could also allow food banks to be counted in countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement or be involved in different climate finance schemes. This opportunity is further

Both the FRAME methodology and the Atlas research are designed to support policymakers and organizations working to curb the damaging effects of methane released into the atmosphere. GFN and its partners will continue to prioritize this important work, to nourish both people and the planet.