I work at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, where I'm a research director of the Food Systems Research Group, and today I'll be talking on, all the issues around how we can tackle food security and some of the sustainable food issues related to climate change and other big sustainability challenges.

We’re one of the research institutes here at UTS and we're essentially like a non-profit, consultancy slash think tank. And we have core areas related to sustainability, as you can see here. And we partner with government and industry and community groups to deliver these research projects. And our mission is to create change towards sustainable futures.

And we have over 120 staff across many, many disciplines.

Let's just dive right in and start with cows, shall we? 

If cows were a country, they would actually be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter, in the world after China and the United States.

It's very significant. And, tying for that position is the Republic of food waste as well.

And while that is quite significant in terms of the, emissions from both those sectors, what it also tells us is those are two of the biggest levers in the food system to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in this country, in agriculture and for the planet. 

Why are we here focusing on the food systems today?

We know that food security is the second sustainable development goal. And essentially food security is about ensuring that all people at all times have access to affordable, nutritious, safe and desirable food anywhere in the world. 

And the idea of a food system is somewhat bigger than food security, because it's about everything that's involved in getting food from nature all the way through, to our dinner plate and beyond. And it includes all the interlinked sectors and actors that are involved in growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, selling, retailing and eating food.

And of course, how we manage all of that food waste and sanitation, too, because all the nutrients we eat and our food come out our other end in our wee and our poo. And it's also the food system is linked very closely and intrinsically to the environment, to the economy and many other sectors like in the energy sector.

In Australia, the food system is incredibly important. It's a huge contributor not only to the economy, but to employment and to our export industries, because we not only deliver food security to Australians, but also, three times our population in the region as well, despite the food system being vital for our very survival, the current path that we're on is not working. 

It's not okay. And we need to change that trajectory because at the moment, the costs of the food system, to the environment, to public health, to our wellbeing is greater than the benefits we're getting from the system. 

We need to change.

We know that the food system is under a lot of pressure. We know that food insecurity is not just an issue that affects the world. A third of people are moderately or severely food insecure, but even in this country, and we often don't talk about it enough, 10% sometimes up to 30%, particularly in the post-Covid post-pandemic era, we're seeing a lot of food insecure people, with rising costs of food, the housing crisis, etc.

And we need to acknowledge that we have a problem in this country that we can and need to address.

We also know at the same time, we're wasting about a third of our food, and we also have an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. And these have been on the rise since the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the past decade or two. 

It's really been ramped up and causing huge issues for public health. And we know, of course, that climate change is having a huge impact, whether we're talking about more frequent and extreme droughts and floods and the diseases that are coming along with that, the impact that that's having on crop yields across the country and the world, on farmer livelihoods, on food prices and on hunger is extreme and certainly alone is reason enough that we need to transform the food system.

And we also know that increasingly, because of a globalised food system, we're very vulnerable to the geopolitical situations which are happening in the far side of the world, such as Russia's war in Ukraine has had a huge impact on supply chains around the world, including agriculture in this country, and other resource scarcity, issues which I'm going to touch upon shortly. 

And we also know that the food system in turn, is having a huge impact and putting pressure back on the planet. And actually, agriculture is one of the biggest single sectors impacting the planet adversely, despite the essentiality of our food system and food security, we need to do things differently. 

We know that having a huge impact on greenhouse gas emissions, on deforestation and habitat loss, on biodiversity loss. 

I think today we have around 95% of all mammals on the planet, excluding humans. Are actually livestock, not wild animals.

And water pollution and scarcity. Agriculture uses about 70% of our water, putting huge water stress. Whether we're talking about in Africa, India or Australia. And water scarcity, not to mention, pollution such as nutrient pollution from running off agricultural fields and wastewater, that's been incorrectly, managed, leading to algal blooms and potentially dead zones around the world.

And we're seeing an increase in zoonotic diseases. Whether we're talking about Covid or influenza or measles, many of these diseases have come to the human population from the domestication of animals and particularly animal agriculture.

We need to be really mindful about those risks and how we can better manage them. In addition to antimicrobial resistance, which is a huge global public health issue that we need to address, and we've got some excellent expertise UTS working on, those issues because, about 80% of antibiotic use, in the world is used for livestock and it's used prophylactically to prevent disease. 

And that is dramatically increasing the antimicrobial resistance that we're now seeing around the world.

But the good news is there are many, many opportunities to build a resilient food system.

And it's one of the reasons why I love working at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, because there's so many opportunities in working with industry and communities and policymakers and farmers to identify what are these Win-Win opportunities that we can tap to address all of these issues.

So we don't get too overwhelmed. 

Let's just zero in on two moderate challenges, climate change you've heard of and some of you may not have heard of the phosphorus security challenge, which we'll touch upon in terms of climate change. 

We know we have these national climate targets that Australia has signed on to.

We have committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 and by 43% by in five years in 2030.

We've also signed on to the voluntary global methane pledge because obviously methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas.

And there's a lot of action that can be taken there. And we've pledged to reduce methane emissions by at least 30% by 2020. And a lot of the opportunities will be in the livestock sector. 

But while Australia has made really, really significant progress towards our climate targets, and particularly through investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency, we're actually not going to meet our targets unless we, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, dramatically in the food system as well, because what most people don't know is that the food system globally contributes around 30% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

But in this country, that's more like 40%. And we don't often hear about this, and we're not having the same kind of public conversations about transitioning to net zero in agriculture as we do in other sectors, like the energy sector and the transport sector. 

We need to be having that conversation, here too. And, actually a quarter or potentially up to a third of those greenhouse gas emissions are not just on farm in agriculture. So not just from tractors and managing manure and livestock, burping.

But before that upstream from the agriculture and downstream. So upstream could be around fertiliser production or downstream relates to food waste and other energy uses.

One of the reasons that we haven't heard so much about the huge impact that the food system is having on greenhouse gas emissions, and hence all the opportunities we can invest in now to reduce those is because the way the IPCC categorises and accounts for emissions across the economy is divided into four main sectors land use, energy, industry and waste. 

But actually, food system related emissions cut across, all of those. It's hidden in all of those. We know that the emissions, as I mentioned, come across the entire food value chain and you probably can't see the tiny detail, but in the colour, you can see the different parts of the value chain. 

And down here you've got different types of food. And what we can see here is that, animal, animal-based foods are far more emissions intensive than plant-based foods. So above this line and beef in particular.

We now have this concept which many of you would have heard of, called Planetary Boundaries to help us understand on a global scale. How do we as humans continue to operate in what we're calling a safe operating space for humanity? 

And that's depicted here in the green, in a circle against, nine key planetary boundaries related to climate change and biodiversity and water, etc.

Unfortunately, the latest analysis, assessment has shown that we've exceeded the safe, levels for six of these boundaries, including climate change and including biogeochemical flows, which is basically phosphorus and nitrogen. Because those nutrients or elements, are fundamental building blocks to all life, whether we're talking about fish or cows or humans or bacteria, none of us would exist without phosphorus and nitrogen.

You all know about oxygen and hydrogen and carbon, but we don't talk enough about phosphorus and nitrogen and the vital role that they play.

Scientists have recommended some thresholds because we're talking about climate change and phosphorus security.

Now, 350 parts per million in the atmosphere for carbon dioxide and for phosphorus, there's been some suggestions that perhaps we should limit the amount of phosphorus fertiliser use going from fertilisers to soil, to under 6.2 million tonnes per annum.

Let's dig a bit deeper into phosphorus security. For those who aren't familiar with this issue.

As I mentioned, phosphorus is essential fundamental building block to all life and essential for food production. Every single farmer in the world needs access to phosphorus to grow the food that we eat.

Yet we have just five countries that control around 83% of the world's remaining phosphate rock. And if you just think about that for a second and compare that to something like water, if five countries in the world controlled the world's water resources, this would be a top issue of national security on every country.

Yet it's not. And we don't hear about it enough.

We have Morocco controls the lion's share, about 68% of all the world's remaining high grade phosphate rock, including, in Western Sahara, which they currently occupy.

You also have, Egypt, China, Tunisia and Russia in the top five.

What this means is that whether we're talking about Australia, India, Africa, Europe, we're all dependent on imports and hence vulnerable to supply disruptions and price spikes.

And as recently as two years ago, we had a 400% price spike of phosphate rock, which had huge ramifications for Australian farmers, for Indian farmers, for farmers all the way around the world.

And we didn't know that that supply disruption was going to happen. That one was because, China at the moment is the is the major producer and exporter of phosphate rock in the world annually. 

But most of the phosphate mines are in the Hubei province, Hubei province, which is the epicentre of the Covid pandemic. So there were naturally, supply chain disruptions there.

And that had, global ramifications. Surprisingly, Australia is actually the world's fifth largest importer of phosphate, despite our tiny population. And that's because we've invested heavily in phosphate intensive, export industries like, like wheat and dairy and livestock, etc. but we have really naturally phosphorus deficient soils. 

We need a lot of phosphorus to add to our soils. They're ancient and weathered like African soils. If we were going to do things differently a couple of hundred years ago, we may have, we may have changed that.

But the good news is, there is a lot that we can do. But what will work in Australia is not the solutions that they're trialling in the US or Japan.

Given there's actually no national or global, formal targets for phosphorus security, unlike, climate change and energy and other key resources, we need to think, how can we feed the world, potentially with investing in phosphorus efficiency and recycling? 

Because let's start to talk about what we can do. So that black line shows the, business as usual future demand for phosphorus to feed the planet.

And the red shows, we've currently relied on mined phosphate rock, but we're going to have to diversify away from that.

I didn't mention that's also a non-renewable finite resource like fossil fuels has the same the same story, same narrative as fossil fuels as well.

The good news is we can fill that very large gap through a portfolio of investing in, a lot of different sustainability measures.

And again, you don't have to be able to read it from the back, but just the blue wedges show, how we can invest in doing things more efficiently to reduce the global demand for phosphorus, because actually phosphorus is one of the most inefficient value chains, in the world. 

80% of the phosphate rock that we mined specifically for food production, ends up wasted or lost, a lot of it ending up in our waterways, causing nutrient pollution. 

If we can be more efficient with that 80% loss, we can do a lot better and avert a crisis. We can be more efficient in agriculture, in the way we produce food. All that food waste we talk about that's got phosphorus in it. You reduce the food waste you reduce the phosphorus losses too.

One of the other great things about phosphorus is that unlike nitrogen, which gets lost to the atmosphere and is a potent greenhouse gas, phosphorus stays where it is in water or organic material like soil and manure. This means if we're smart, we can recover and reuse all of that phosphorus in our food, waste, in our wastewater, in the manure, in crop residues.

And that's where we're going to get, really smart, I think in the future.

And we need to make sure, we don't have the luxury of time. We need to make sure that the solutions we're looking for are transformative, we're not looking for little tweaks in the system. 

We want to make sure that it crosses all scales, not just local solutions, but these have to be planetary solutions. These have to be national solutions.

And we need farmers on board, but we also need supermarkets and food consumers and fertiliser companies and everyone in between. 

And we also need to be seeking co-benefits. What I mean by that is we're not just trying to address water pollution or phosphorus security or decarbonising the food system, but we want to be doing all of that. 

And also trying to achieve energy security and restore environments and everything in between where we can must be a bit modest, otherwise we're not going to meet our SDGs.

What are the specific goals or national priorities in Australia for thinking about a sustainable food and agricultural system?

We know we need to decarbonise and we have our net zero targets. We know we need to improve productivity across the economy, but also specifically in agriculture. 

Productivity has been in decline in terms of both yields.

The crop yields that we're getting for the amount of inputs that we're putting in, but also in terms of the economic productivity, that's going to be key, not just to the economy, but to the livelihoods of our farmers and rural, businesses and communities.

Food security is finally back on the agenda in this country. You may have seen that there was an announcement, a pre-election announcement, and now there's a national food security strategy, which is under development.

In consultation as we speak. It will be very interesting to see what happens there. We need to have a nutrient security in this plan in other countries.

We don't yet have that. But we're working on it. I mentioned jobs and livelihoods are incredibly important. We know that. And we also have the, future Made in Australia, plan, in place to support domestic manufacturing.

A lot of these solutions can also contribute towards local jobs in this country, which also helps buffer against those, risky supply chains from overseas.

And we also need to not just protect our environment but regenerate and restore nature.

And finally, we have a, a public health epidemic, and we know that the food system can contribute greatly to improving some of those outcomes, particularly cardiovascular diseases and obesity, etc.

The circular economy is one promising strategy which can help us get towards all of those multiple goals.

And you probably heard about the circular economy. It has three basic fundamental pillars, if you like, which are around minimising waste and pollution, which are around recirculating or keeping, valuable products in circulation for as long as possible. 

So we're not just producing disposable products.

And the third pillar is around, restoring nature. There's a lot of work that's been gone on into developing circular economy plans for other sectors. It's been applied a lot less to food and agriculture.

But we need to be investing more in that. And we've just finished a really good, big project working for the Australian agricultural sector on what would a circular economy look like for Australian agriculture, and what are some of the big roadblocks to scaling it up?

And essentially what it's trying to do is, is say, “How can we continue for agriculture and the food system to deliver value and maybe even increase value and the service that it provides?” whether that's food security or jobs or soil security, but just decouple that from all of the growing environmental, health, and other risks that are happening in the background that we talked about in that, that blue and green infinity slide, there are many, many different circular opportunities that we can be investing in. 

And these range widely from things like selling a service instead of a product. And this was made famous, you know, probably 20 years ago by the carpet company interface. Which, which decided rather than, say, if we were standing on carpet here and there was a burn hole in the carpet, rather than having to rip up the whole carpet, roll it up, send it to landfill, which is very bulky and material intensive. If you're leasing carpet, the carpet company would just come and reinsert a new carpet tile here. 

So it reduces the material intensity.

But we can do that same kind of idea for the food system, for example, fertiliser retailers, rather than just selling fertilisers. And their huge environmental burden could be selling a service like crop productivity or soil health to farmers so that the farmer gets the outcome that they need, in terms of their budgets and their profits and their yields, and it's better for the environment because then you don't have extra phosphorus and nitrogen going on to that farm and potentially running off, causing algal blooms in the waterway and depleting this finite resource.

Then at the other end of the spectrum, there's reuse and recovery options, like the anaerobic digestion of manure and food waste to produce bioenergy. 

And of course, you also at the end of that get a very lovely digestate, which can be used as a clean feedstock to produce renewable fertilisers. And there's a million other opportunities in between.

But one of the important things we need to pay attention to here, with the circular economy for agriculture, is to make sure that the transition is done in coordination with other sectors, because what we're seeing is so much innovation and interest in circular economy, in individual sectors, in siloed sectors. 

But if they don't interlink, then we can end up with situations of technology, lock in or even risk competition for the same organic wastes and a really good example there is the aviation sector in Australia is really taking this seriously, and they've earmarked a lot of crop residues in Australia's agricultural sector to use as sustainable aviation fuels, because we all want to continue flying and transport things across the globe.

And they need to come up with some sustainable fuel. 

But the problem is, if they take all of that organic residues from farms and use it for energy and for flying, if that is not returned back to the soils in agriculture, we may not be able to continue to grow food because all of those nutrients, all of that organic matter, is essential in the soil to growing crops that we need for food security.

And no one's really talking about that. 

So that's why we really need to make sure we bring sectors together, to discuss these issues collaboratively.

I also just wanted to share another project we've recently finished called the PACSAN Project. And that is about the Phosphorus And Climate Smart Agriculture Network. It's a collaborative project with stakeholders across the food system in Australia and also in China, where we were looking at what are the most impactful, sustainable measures that can both reduce greenhouse gas emissions across our whole food system, the whole food value chain, and also reduce phosphorus demand or recycled phosphorus. 

We wanted to choose those two twin challenges.

I was going to show you this really cool interactive model that we've developed from the Decarbonizing Australia's food system, and what it basically shows is all those different rainbow colours of the different sectors along the value chain, whether it's fertiliser manufacturing, livestock, you know, food retailing, etc.

And the dotted line is our business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions in the do nothing approach.

And then you've got our net zero targets. We want to get 43% and then net zero by 2050 down the bottom.

And as the user, you could be a stakeholder or the public, anyone can go in and slide any one of these eight sustainable measures that might be around, increasing electrification, to renewable energy away from gas and diesel for cold storage and tractors on farm use or creating renewable fertilisers. 

You can slide that opportunity from 0 to 100 and watch that curve bend down.

It's almost like a game for trying to make net zero. 

It's a way to get a conversation started between stakeholders about what combination of portfolio of sustainable measures do we need to meet net zero in agriculture and the whole food system?

The eight measures that we looked at, won't go through them all, but the first one was around renewable fertilisers.

And by that I mean, for nitrogen, you would be using, renewable hydrogen instead of natural gas to produce ammonia. Ammonia is one of the critical intermediate resources that's required to produce fertilisers. It's nitrogen based, but it produces an awful lot of nitrous oxide, it’s a really potent greenhouse gas. And on the phosphorus side, we want to be recovering all of that organic material we talked about in food waste and wastewater, to produce those renewable fertilisers.

But we can also do things like improve nutrient productivity on farm. There's a lot of ways we can tap into the phosphorus that's already locked up in the soil rather than continually applying new fertilisers.

We can sequester carbon into soils. We can look at crop types, that are better in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

We know that rice per traditional rice production is a huge greenhouse gas emitter.

But there are other crop varieties. Or, globally, we talk about sorghum and millet being really good sustainable crop varieties.

And in Australia we have been looking at livestock feed additives based on asparagopsis algae to reduce the fermentation in their gut and hence their burping out methane. 

And then seven is sustainable food choices. So how can we, shift from our overconsumption of animal proteins towards more plant based, consumption and eight is food waste avoidance.

What we found for those eight different measures that I mentioned in terms of greenhouse gas reduction, what is the potential over the next 25 years until we get to our net zero target of 2050?

What's the potential? And you can see the biggest ones here are around sustainable food choices and livestock feed additives and energy productivity.

For energy productivity we’re going to need the collaboration to electrify with a whole bunch of, different sectors, including the transport sector.

Zooming in on diets. We know that Australia actually has the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions for our diets compared to other G20 countries. 

And you can see Australia at the very top, and the dark blue is our current emissions from our current diet and the lighter blue bar there next for the Australia at the top shows that if we were actually following the national Dietary guidelines, which is a little bit healthier than what we currently eat, we would actually be dramatically reducing our greenhouse gas emissions at the same time.

And even further than that, you might not be able to see this red dotted line here. If we were to live within the safe operating space of humanity within this planetary boundary, we would need to reduce our emissions even more, through changed diets. 

And I'll come back to phosphorus in terms of what this project and the analysis showed with the major opportunities in the next, two and a half decades to reduce phosphorus demand and provide supply for renewable fertilisers.

We found that the number one measure, again, was sustainable food choices. In addition to nutrient productivity, reducing food waste, this is on the demand side. 

And on the supply side, there's huge potential in Australia to tap phosphorus in manure in our crop waste, our food waste and our human excreta.

We also know that with greenhouse gas emissions, the Australian diet also comes out number one in terms of the biggest phosphorus footprint per capita. 

What the phosphorus footprint means, it's the amount of phosphate or phosphorus that was mined in China or Morocco to sustain our diets for one year each of our diets. 

And in that bar, you can see that the dark blue, refers to our meat, dairy and eggs consumption, whereas the light blue refers to vegetable consumption.

What it shows is the phosphorus footprint of our diets is very much linked to our animal protein consumption as well.

We're just going to dive a little bit deeper into two of our examples, starting off with renewable fertilisers.

And I'm going to talk a little bit about stacked benefits because we talked earlier that we need to look for co-benefits.

What are the other benefits here. And this is really important for communicating with policymakers and businesses about what are the whole suite of benefits that when you stack them up, it's quite overwhelming and exciting.

You can see all of these opportunities once you put it together, because I think that's also the tricky, challenge about a lot of these, solutions is that the costs or the problem doesn't just occur in one sector, it crosses sectors, but it also means that the opportunities cross sectors too. 

We need to look at how we can co-invest in these kinds of things.

I've already mentioned what our definition of renewable fertilisers is and there's huge benefits for food security because if we're producing these in Australia, for example, from domestic, organic wastes, we can buffer against those fertiliser price spikes. 

The 400% price spikes two years ago, the 800% price spikes that we saw in 2008.

And we can reduce our dependence on risky import markets because we are still very dependent on imports, even though we produce some phosphate rock here as well. 

And this can provide security, for farmers in terms of fertiliser supplies, which they need every year.

And all of that organic matter is fantastic for soil health and can have huge, benefits for retaining moisture in the soil, which is great in terms of more climate resilient, soils and agriculture in the face of droughts.

We also know that there's many benefits for water security, first, in terms of reducing nutrient pollution, of our waterways, because we know that one of those planetary boundaries that phosphorus is exceeding the safe operating space, largely because there's a lot of phosphorus and nitrogen coming out of our wastewater, and also agriculture causing widespread nutrient pollution. 

And if we're, recovering all those nutrients from wastewater and agriculture before they get to our waterways, it's going to have huge environmental benefits there.

And it can also improve the wastewater treatment process. It can also improve our climate resilience because we know that, the greenhouse gas impact of nitrogen fertilisers is about 5% of total global, emissions, which is huge in terms of producing fertilisers, but also using them. 

And reducing organic waste like food waste to landfill if we're reusing it instead. It doesn't have that potent methane generation that's happening in landfill.

In addition to help sequestering carbon. And there's a huge range of other benefits.

And the second example is the stacked benefits associated with shifting to more sustainable diets.

There's this planetary health diet, which was developed by a collaborative initiative called the EAT-Lancet Commission over the past five or more years. And essentially it shows that regardless of the region of the world we're talking about, we all need to shift our diets towards more, fresh vegetables, away from more starchy vegetables, towards more complex grains, more plant proteins, etc.

Huge benefits for the environment. We know it can dramatically reduce our water energy footprint, phosphorus footprints, reduce land use, and hence deforestation and contribute to increasing biodiversity.

Again, massive public health benefits for addressing the disease burden related to diabetes, heart disease, obesity and the cancer risks that we've heard about in the past, 5 or 10 years related to processed red meats, and also those zoonic risks we talked about including things like salmonella as well because food safety issues would be improved, food risks reduced, and the antimicrobial resistance risks.

And then of course, if you're reducing that disease burden as well at those top bullet points, then you're reducing healthcare costs because the current health care costs are absolutely, profound related to these diseases, which are very much related to our current diet, in addition to our lifestyles, of course, huge benefits for climate, climate resilience, particularly around methane emissions from we talked about from, food waste, but also, livestock and manure emissions, the reduced nitrous oxide emissions from the extra fertilisers that wouldn't be required and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the extra, cold storage processing, transport that would be avoided as well. 

Not to mention the equity and welfare benefits for both animals and for us in terms of social equity, because some of these foods are likely to be more accessible, more affordable. 

We talk a lot about these really big, exciting ideas. But at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, when we're working closely with stakeholders who want to implement some of these things, we want to talk about how ready are these opportunities to transform.

We talk a lot about technology readiness. There's a scale from 1 to 9 of whether a technology is still in the lab under development, is it being prototyped? Is it fully commercialised?

Why can't we do the same thing for all of these other categories? We need to know, is the market ready?

And going back to our example of renewable fertilisers in a circular economy, we need to be thinking not with a waste management paradigm, that we're trying to just prevent all that waste from polluting waterways or releasing greenhouse gas emissions.

But if we want it to be reused, then we actually might need to start with the market, identify our target end users. So is it indoor tomato growers, is it broad acre, corn growers who might use these products?

What fertilisers do they currently use? Do they use pellets, liquid, sludge? What machinery do they currently use?

Have they already invested in? How much they pay? At what price point might they shift to a new product?

What are their current preferences and priorities and limitations? What can they do to still sell to Coles and Woolworths?

Because obviously they wouldn't want to use a product that they can't, that would prevent them from selling. 

We need to think about all of that first and then go back to our waste sources, our food waste and our sewage and say, well, what technologies can we use to treat this waste, to convert it into a product that will meet our end user’s needs?

That's really important. We need to start at that end. And we also need to think about stakeholder readiness.

Are stakeholders ready to transform? Are they aware of these issues? Are they motivated to change? Are they already taking action? 

And we did a recent study to assist farmers and rural businesses’ readiness, or appetite to change towards circular economy practices.

And what we found for those that were surveyed is that they were aware and they were motivated, but a lot of them weren't taking action. And that's because, things were outside of the barriers, were outside of their sphere of control. It wasn't something that they could easily do. The barriers were systemic barriers beyond their control, like regulatory fragmentation across states between Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

Or lack of financing a small and medium sized farmer can't afford, you know, $1.5 million capital cost to put a biogas digester on site. But who else might be able to co-finance that.

How can that be a co-financing model or how can the government provide incentives or tax breaks? Or philanthropic support or private equity? And how can we share those risks? 

And we need to think about what skills we need in this country and what capacity do we already have?

Are we going to be importing, skills, skilled labour from, from overseas to deliver?

Or do we need to start thinking about our education and training pipeline now within, within TAFE, within universities, within others?

And how long is that? So that's really important for any transition. And finally, knowledge readiness.

Do we have the knowledge to be able to support evidence-based decisions? 

And obviously that's where we all come into play at universities and other research institutes. Incredibly important. 

So just some very final take home messages.

The food system is under pressure. I think we all know that. It's pretty serious. The path we're on is not okay. And we need to change that in big transformational ways. And there's many opportunities from decarbonising to circularising.

But we do need to look for those co-benefits. Some of the biggest the levers of change to decarbonise are related to food waste and shifting our diets. 

And we need to talk about, what would a climate smart planetary diet look like in this country?

And how do we get there? The phosphorus security still not on the agenda, and it needs to be, but it can be tackled with the circular economy, with opportunities like renewable fertilisers.

In addition to as well shifting to more plant-based diets. But we need to bring all sectors together to collaborate and coordinate this transformational change with the food sector, the energy sector, environment, transport, trade, all of it, in order to transform. 

And, I hope that was a bit of food for thought and I look forward to any questions if we have any time left.