EU Business & Biodiversity Platform co-hosted the European Conference "Biodiversity in Food Supply Chains" for its Food Retail Sector Sprint.

On 13-14 November 2024, the EU Business & Biodiversity Platform co-hosted the European Conference "Biodiversity in Food Supply Chains" in Berlin, organised by Food for Biodiversity and alongside a second co-host, the Federation of German Food and Drink Industries (BVE). The conference was attended by leading experts in industry, politics, and science who shared perspectives on challenges and solutions on integrating biodiversity into our food systems. 

The first session of the conference focused on reducing risk and provided an update on the shifting policy environment. This included discussions on the standardisation of ESG reporting, how to be on equal footing with financial reporting, moving away from voluntary standards and benchmarking.

The EU Business & Biodiversity Platform hosted a Breakout session "The Food Retail Sector and Biodiversity: Overcoming Barriers to Change Throughout the Value Chain". The session was moderated by Rhona Perkins from the EU Business & Biodiversity Platform and saw participation from Kathleen Heinzel of Lidl International, Marcel Winter of the Federation of German Food and Drink Industries and Ariane Coulombe of CDP. The speakers discussed challenges across the food retail sector's value chain, from implementation to reporting. This was followed by an interactive group-session exploring challenges, bottlenecks and solutions with participants. Key insights included challenges accessing finance and lack of consumer awareness in the face of complex information and bottlenecks around data privacy.

The final session on monitoring and reporting included a session from Wouter Dieleman of the EU Business & Biodiversity Platform who spoke about biodiversity disclosure initiatives.

If you are interested in learning more about the outcomes of the conference and the presentations from different sessions, please have a look at Food for Biodiversity’s website here.

A more detailed write-up of the results from the break-out session will be included in the Food Retail Sector Sprint Report which will be published in Spring 2025.

We are still open to engaging with retail sector businesses who can contribute to our Food Retail Sector Sprint by providing insights on their experiences integrating biodiversity measurement, action and reporting. Please contact us at EU_BBPICF [dot] com (EU_BBP[at]ICF[dot]com) if you have 30 minutes to spare to participate in this important initiative.