Rosanna Crawford, TCA Accelerator Outreach and Communications Coordinator

2024 is a significant year for many reasons. High numbers of regional and national elections have contributed to a constantly shifting political landscape, with the US election still to come next week. At the same time, temperature records have been broken around the world, and reports on the state of biodiversity loss are increasingly dire. 

The TCA Dialogue Series aims to develop and implement an action plan to dramatically scale True Cost Accounting implementation by 2030. TCA is an indispensable tool for transforming food systems and addressing global challenges. The Series is organized around six thematic tracks to understand the remaining barriers and most strategic opportunities to advance TCA adoption by 2030, while building upon the important advances that have been made in this field in recent years (examples include FAO’s State of Food & Agriculture 2023, TEEBAgriFood, Rockefeller Foundation’s True Cost of Food: School Meals Case Study, and Global Alliance and GIST Impact’s TCA study on community managed natural farming in Andhra Pradesh, and many more. This knowledge will be distilled into an Action Plan to drive work toward this goal by governments, business, civil society, academia, philanthropy, and other stakeholders.

Ahead of COP16, on October 9, our Dialogue Series began with a workshop on Global Policy and Action. Participants discussed how to scale up TCA in the face of growing biodiversity and climate crises, rising social inequality, and the increasing global burden of poor health and non-communicable diseases.

Workshops participants brought examples from their current work, including leveraging procurement for market shifts and integrating TCA into emergent national policies. The conversation highlighted the need to bridge the gap between research and policy, address corporate influence, and ensure TCA tools are usable for policymakers. Challenges such as data availability, model complexity, and the economic impact on vulnerable groups were discussed. Solutions proposed included repurposing existing funds, improving transparency in supply chains, and simplifying TCA models. 

This blog will summarize the highlights of the discussion. A blog post will be published after each workshop in the Dialogue Series; it is important to us that knowledge and learning shared at the workshops is made available to the wider TCA community. Unless otherwise noted, this summary reflects the perspectives and comments of individual participants.

Conflict between Capital and Rights
As businesses and governments attempt to ‘internalize’ the negative market externalities causing climate change and biodiversity loss, they have turned to nature bonds and biodiversity credits. These financial instruments assign a monetary value to ecosystem services, or to conservation efforts. 

However, assigning a dollar value to nature fails to capture its social, cultural and health values, and, some participants feared, could lead to commodification. This commodification could endanger already vulnerable communities’ access to water, food, or to their native lands and natural resources. 

The True Cost Accounting movement would therefore benefit from alignment to rights based approaches in agriculture, conservation, healthcare, labor and development. 

“Rights-based approaches are about balancing the value of this analysis with an approach that is inclusive, that brings dialogue, that brings peoples’ rights and needs into the conversation. We want to explore what this looks like in practice”.
Workshop Participant

TCA can also learn from the field of environmental valuation, where there is still disagreement on methodologies for valuation, and a need to acknowledge that many environmental goods and services can’t be monetized. TCA can be a tool to communicate multiple forms of value, capturing both hidden costs and benefits using quantitative and qualitative data. 

Gap between Research and Policy
Engaging policymakers on TCA is hampered by the influence of corporations, the pressure to deliver in short-term political cycles, and the complexity of TCA methodologies. 

“Transformation agendas are, by definition, going to be longer than a political cycle.”
Workshop Participant

Although some countries are implementing TCA at the national level, uptake is limited as efforts to make TCA more accessible have fallen short. There needs to be recognition that a one-size fits all approach won’t work in the face of different countries’ challenges and priorities.

“How do we use a tool that is about rethinking economics, the way we account, to lead us towards transformative change?”
Workshop Participant

In the face of these challenges, it’s important to remember that TCA is a tool to hold our hand on the way to transformative change. A key message to communicate to policymakers is how TCA can create a solid evidence base for transitioning to sustainable, equitable food systems, facilitating transparent and holistic policy decisions. 

The Lack of Relevant and Affordable Data
Often, efforts to undertake TCA assessments highlight the lack of available, high quality data. This means that researchers and practitioners are spending time and money collecting new data to run analyses, or that the scope of TCA studies is limited by data availability and quality. This is particularly problematic as it was noted that having evidence from local contexts was far more effective in shifting mindsets when working with policymakers. 

In managing data access problems, it was proposed that better funding, enhancing data collection expertise, encouraging data sharing and even partnering with big data organizations would be possible solutions. However, another avenue for making TCA more accessible would be to provide specific data guidance for researchers, which in turn could speed uptake for policy making. 

“It’s impossible to do the research in every system, so I think we need to find ways to simplify the process, but still give indicative numbers.”
Workshop Participant

Next Steps
Thank you to all the participants who attended the Global Policy and Action workshop, and our track leads, Lauren Baker and Paula Daniels. Thinking collectively about how to influence and change global policy means grappling with complex power relationships in an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment, combined with the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crises. We appreciate the thoughtfulness and expertise of all who attended and contributed to the conversation.

Scaling Implementation workshops are continuing into February 2025, covering barriers and opportunities to our goal of dramatically scaling TCA by 2030 within the themes of private sector implementation, finance and investment, research, communications and advocacy, and movement convergence. We will also hold regional workshops, as well as public facing, interactive sessions in the lead up to an in-person TCA Summit in April. We will post information on our socials (Twitter/X, LinkedIn) and our event site.