Rosanna Crawford, TCA Accelerator Outreach and Communications Coordinator

“We have reached a now or never moment for upscaling TCA.” 

In 2018, the TEEBAgriFood Evaluation Framework established a common architecture for applications of True Cost Accounting (TCA). This was a landmark in TCA’s development, representing a widespread consensus on the required elements of TCA applications and inspiring dozens of public and private sector case studies. 

However, TEEBAgriFood was not prescriptive regarding what methodologies, indicators, or data practitioners should use.

Fast forward to 2025, this has become a sticking point in the TCA community. Some see the flexible approach to varying methodologies as permitting context-specific adaptations – necessary considering food systems’ complexity.

Others see the lack of a standardized approach as a critical barrier to mainstreaming uptake of TCA. The cost and intricacy of analyses and the difficulty comparing different TCA assessments are preventing policymakers, investors, businesses, and other decision-makers from embracing TCA as a tool to enable the transition to sustainable, healthy, and equitable food systems. 

At our TCA Evaluations workshop on 11 December 2024, we sought to confront these tensions head on, bringing together a diverse group of practitioners, experts and researchers to delve into the barriers and opportunities to scaling TCA by 2030. 

Our participants were clear-eyed on the challenges to scale TCA, and were emphatic about the need to empower all stakeholders: from the farmer collecting primary data, to the researchers undertaking analyses, in order to provide holistic and reliable findings for stakeholders, from grassroots organizers to national policymakers.

These were the key themes of the conversation:

• Collaborating with farmers on mutually beneficial data collection 
• Drawing the boundaries of TCA assessments
• Embracing technology to find solutions  
• The perennial tension: standardized vs flexible True Cost Accounting methods 

Farm to Data-Table
Over the course of the Dialogue Series, workshop participants have frequently referenced the need for more and better data. Farms are a key source of primary data for TCA, but what is too much to ask of farmers? Considering the many different demands on farmers’ time, on-farm data collection must provide benefits to the farmer as well as the researcher. 

“Farmers need data for their own understanding of their systems and to help them to make decisions. Everybody else wants that data, that data has value; it must be rewarded.”
Workshop Participant

One innovative method to encourage and promote data quality is setting up participatory guarantee systems, whereby farmers’ data is validated by peers as opposed to (often expensive) third parties. For TCA assessments, this would have the advantage of enabling rapid data collection from multiple sources, rather than requiring an external organization to act as an intermediary.

This data can in turn be used by farmers to facilitate on-farm decision making: “so that that information that we’re trying to collect is really helping the farmer first”. 

Drawing the boundaries of TCA assessments
These reflections on data collection evolved into a discussion on the challenges of scoping TCA assessments. There is a current lack of consensus among TCA practitioners on the indicators necessary for assessments, and participants raised concerns around missing measures including consumer health, biodiversity, and the societal costs of infectious diseases.

Incorporating these measures into TCA methodologies requires collaboration with and between organizations including UN agencies, like the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization. Practitioners can also learn from the field of life cycle assessment (LCA) and the ways LCA analysts have tackled questions around biodiversity and disease indicators.

Two workshop participants shared their thoughts on the value of “learning by doing” when it comes to TCA assessments. They described exploring different avenues for measuring biodiversity, and over time, learning what data is both most material, and most feasible, to collect.  

Embracing Technology
2024 sped progression towards the Fifth Industrial Revolution: technology — artificial intelligence in particular — is expected to radically change how we live, learn and work. Certainly, when it comes to the familiar issues of how to streamline TCA data collection and analysis, our workshop participants felt positive about the potential benefits of technology. 

One idea was the creation of “data spaces” – a space where data can be requested by different users after it has been collected. This would avoid stakeholders, like farmers, filling out multiple questionnaires, and improve the convenience of TCA as a tool. 

“I think we need to come to a point where data is collected once, and used multiple times”
Workshop Participant 

Another suggestion to improve TCA’s accessibility was to develop a software solution, akin to software created for conducting LCAs. This software was a key catalyst for speeding the uptake of LCA, and a similar initiative could similarly drive the scaling of TCA by 2030. 

Although technology can be a significant enabler, there remains a lack of a clear “ask” from the TCA community in terms of what technological solutions require funding – and until this is resolved, sufficient investment will be difficult to raise. 

Standardized or Flexible?
The degree to which TCA approaches should be further harmonized has long proved to be a sticky topic in the TCA community. 

While TEEBAgriFood established a common framework, a common approach to implementation was proposed by some workshop participants as a crucial step in scaling TCA. These participants felt that a lack of standardization in methods is slowing down the movement, and contributing to fragmentation. One approach could be standardizing a minimum set of core data requirements for each assessment. 

“We often trip ourselves up thinking that a framework needs to solve everyone’s problems”
Workshop Participant

However, others didn’t see a problem with practitioners using multiple approaches. They thought it was more important to encourage a sound understanding of the topic or issue under investigation, incentivizing more in-depth approaches to TCA. Flexible approaches allow affected stakeholders to shape TCA assessments and tailor their scope in a way that is appropriate to diverse cultures, geographies, and sectors. 

While having core data requirements would make results more comparable, practically speaking, data collection in many countries is expensive and having to conform to a set approach could prove prohibitive to undertaking any TCA assessment. 

The question of standardized vs flexible methods will not, and should not, be resolved in one workshop, but these insights are invaluable as we work to identify the most strategic actions needed to meet the goal to dramatically scale TCA implementation by 2030. 

Thank You
Thank you to our workshop participants and co-leads for a thought-provoking and generative discussion of TCA Evaluations. The themes discussed during this workshop are complex and sometimes contentious. Our participants showed a willingness to tackle these issues head on and proposed many different innovative solutions. 

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 integration.

We are also holding regional workshops in the lead up to an in-person TCA Summit in April. You can find more information on our event site.