Healthy Soil 4 Healthy Diets

Dear food and soil enthusiasts,

“You are what you eat” is a saying that comes with a true essence: How and what you eat has great impact on your daily life. Why not try and make your diet as good as possible? There are so many reasons to care about food: it nourishes body and soul, has the power to connect and inspire us and is often at the very heart of culture and social life.

Yet long before preparing our meals, the foundation for healthy food can be found in the ground,
to be exact in our soils, since they provide the basis for over 95 per cent of our food. This makes soils a vital part of our food system. However, they are under threat: On a global scale, more and more soils face degradation. And while the amount of land available for agriculture is shrinking, the number of people who need to be fed and well-nourished is growing.

To protect our soils and ensure food security we need innovative tools. This is where the Global Programme “Soil Protection and Rehabilitation for Food Security” (ProSoil) implemented by
the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH steps in. Commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and co-funded by the European Union (EU), ProSoil supports local, national and international partners in imple- menting and exchanging knowledge on agroecological soil protection and rehabilitation measures tobuild resilience against multiple crises and ensure food security. This applies in particular to the EU-cofunded part of ProSoil “Enhancing soils and agroecology for resilient agricultural and food systems in Sub-Saharan Arica” (ProSilience). This cookbook is our way of sharing this knowledge with you. We invite you to flip through the pages and try some of our delicious recipes from all around
the world.

Clarifying and communicating the values of grasslands is essential to catalysing increased conservation, restoration and sustainable management. Grasslands and savannahs face significant and widespread threats from multiple fronts and are an underacknowledged ecosystem in the minds and imaginations of people around the world. The report reflects a growing recognition and commitment to grassland and savannah conservation within WWF and partners, due to their critical roles in food security, biodiversity, ecosystem services and human cultures. It contributes to momentum building towards the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists and the next Conference of the Parties of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Mongolia, both in 2026. This report aims to help governments to develop ambitious yet realistic conservation strategies for these critical ecosystems and inform private sector initiatives and finance. 

Since its launch at COP 26, the Breakthrough Agenda has become established as an annual collaborative process centred around the Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It is currently supported by over 60 countries representing over 80% of global GDP, and by over 150 initiatives working to enhance collaboration within major emitting sectors. Countries can endorse Breakthrough goals to make clean technologies and sustainable practices more affordable, accessible and attractive than their alternatives by 2030 in the power, road transport, hydrogen, steel, cement and buildings sectors.

The Breakthrough Agenda establishes an annual cycle to track developments towards these goals, identify where further co-ordinated international action is urgently needed to accelerate progress and then galvanise public and private international action behind these specific priorities in order to make these transitions quicker, cheaper, and easier for all.

To initiate this cycle, world leaders tasked the IEA and the Climate High-Level Champions to develop an annual Breakthrough Agenda report to provide an independent evidence base and expert recommendations for where stronger international collaboration is needed. From 2022-2024, the reports contained a detailed assessment on the state of international collaboration across these sectors in areas such as definitions, standards and certification, demand creation and management, research and innovation, finance and investment, infrastructure, and trade conditions, among others.

The Breakthrough Agenda Report 2025 – the fourth in the annual series – takes a different approach to previous reports, in that it does not contain the same detailed sector-by-sector assessment. Instead, this year’s report focuses on enhancing the methodology behind the detailed progress assessments, provides practical examples of collaboration through deep dives, and introduces a new focus chapter on fertilisers.