Former Defra boss David Kennedy has called on the food industry to bring the “wartime” spirit of its battle during the pandemic to the fight against climate change.
Kennedy, now corporate sustainability partner at EY, is helping to spearhead the launch of a new transition plan launched by the IGD last week. It sets out the huge changes needed to carbon emissions, diets and packaging if the UK is to hit its net zero targets.
Kennedy – Defra’s ex-director general of food, biosecurity and trade, who joined the accountancy firm last year having led the Food Resilience Industry Forum (FRIF), or so-called ‘war room’, during Covid – said despite the scale of transformation required, the transition to net zero was “achievable” if the industry worked together.
“I do think it has strong parallels with the war room and what it achieved,” he told The Grocer. “Everybody came together in a highly competitive industry then worked together to solve a common problem.
“I remember CEOs of supermarkets saying to me it is amazing, we would never have thought this was possible, but it showed what could be done.”
The IGD report, titled A Net Zero Transition Plan for the UK Food System, calls for “urgent action on diets”, including a reduction in consumption of red meat and dairy of at least 20%, to hit targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions for 2030 and 2050.
“The key message is we have got very ambitious targets for food companies, but what we show in this report is that whilst these targets are really challenging, they can be met if we have urgent and concentrated action from industry in partnership with government,” said Kennedy.
Major barriers set out in the report include drawing up plans to accelerate the industry war on food waste, with a focus on new ways to try to tackle consumer food waste.
It will also look at ways to create a scalable market for re-usable packaging in supermarkets and major changes to carbon emissions from transport.
Speaking at the launch of the report, environment minister Daniel Zeichner said: “I think it is very important that the report concludes that it’s quite possible to do this in a way that doesn’t come at the expense of productivity or profitability.
“There are many things we can ask people to do, but we’ve got to work with the grain of a system.”
Yesterday, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced “ambitious” plans to cut emissions by 81% by 2035, but stressed his government would not “tell people how to live their lives”.
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