Tracking Progress, Managing Interactions & Strengthening Partnerships: Insights from the Food Systems Countdown Initiative

The Food Systems Countdown Initiative (FSCI) is a global research initiative bringing together experts from all major world regions, diverse disciplines, and varied institutions, including UN agencies, academia, and civil society (a full list is available on the Countdown website). It monitors a set of food systems indicators and provides annual publications that support evidence-based policymaking and accountability to achieve food systems transformation. This independent initiative seeks to complement and support other monitoring efforts, such as those for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other global goals.

The 2025 FSCI publication

The recent FSCI publication analyzes change, and lack of change, over time in FSCI’s food systems indicators. It also examines interactions between indicators. Better understanding interactions is critical because change (or lack thereof) in one indicator can cause (or block) changes in others. In the past, those interactions were often not taken into account. For example, the short-term objective of reducing hunger by ensuring the availability of staple foods favored monocropping leading to cheap and abundant staple foods—without considering how such an approach in the long term impacts biodiversity or makes other nutrient-dense foods seem relatively expensive, reducing overall diet quality and harming nutrition.

Better understanding these interactions represents an opportunity to better manage synergies and tradeoffs between goals. Also, joint action across different parts of food systems can result in changes that are larger than the sum of the individual shifts. For example, actions and policies targeted at diversification can increase access to a diversity of food groups, and environmental resilience, which also contribute to market risk management, coping mechanisms, and climate adaptation.

Now, what can we take away from the report for building food systems partnerships?

First, partnerships can reinforce progress where it has occurred and refocus energy where it has not—while remaining aware that each element of the food system interacts with other elements. 20 out of the 42 indicators, for which there were sufficient data from multiple years to analyse trends over time, are moving in the right direction. This includes indicators across all five themes - diets & nutrition, environment & productivity, livelihoods, resilience, and governance. We can build on this positive momentum for further systems change.

Second, cross-sectoral partnerships are crucial for anticipating and managing the multiple interactions identified. One third of the interactions identified occurs across themes. Governance and resilience indicators show the largest number of connections to other themes. One example is civil society participation (an indicator within governance), which could potentially influence child labor rates, legal recognition of the right to food, or food safety capacity by bringing more attention to these important issues and thus helping spark progress on addressing them. Thoughtfully considering governance and resilience in food systems partnerships is thereby crucial.

Third, leverage points can indicate where partnerships and coordinated actions might be most impactful or needed. Indicators that are found to affect many others, such as food price volatility, suggest areas where a change could have broad impact across themes. For example, by lowering food price volatility, we may be able to improve diets, bring about more sustainable agricultural practices, and improve employment in rural areas. Partnerships can be used to anticipate and manage these potential synergies and tradeoffs across food systems actors. Indicators that are directly affected by multiple others have many drivers, suggesting that desirable change may require coordinated actions across all influencing domains. For example, it may not be possible to achieve minimum dietary diversity goals without improving food availability, increasing yields, strengthening social protection, and reducing volatility in food prices and supplies.

The FSCI image below is interactive, click here to explore linkages between the indicators