The Global Food Loss and Waste Tracker will support the global effort by United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (UNFAO) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to measure and manage food loss and waste so that we can achieve SDG 2 - Zero Hunger, SGD 12 - Responsible Consumption & Production, and SDG 13 - Climate Action targets by 2030.

With these data, we can track food waste at every stage in the food system from farm to fork, avoiding edible food waste and managing inedible food waste.

Additionally, it helps users to understand the monetary value and the avoidable potential greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of edible and inedible food waste.

Globally, one third of the food grown for human consumption is wasted which is over 1.3 billion tonnes. In the UK alone it is estimated that 4.5 million tonnes of food (WRAP, 2020) is wasted a year from households excluding the inedible parts. For most regions, we have little or no available data.

The potential economic loss from global food waste has been estimated to be over £800 billion with potential environmental impact of over 3.3 GTonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

In fact, Agrifood production contributes to 26% of GHG emission and food produced but not consumed accounts for 8% of total GHG.

However, it is more challenging that in the midst of so much food waste, over 800 million people are hungry, over 1.9 billion people are under-nourished, either diabetic, obese, etc. leading to 1 in 5 deaths linked to malnutrition.

Hence, the time to act is now so that we can halve food waste by 2030 and sustainably feed over 9.5 billion people by 2050.

Measuring and tracking food waste across the food system has become imperative as we can only change what we can measure.

The Global Food Loss and Waste Tracker will provide real time awareness on the environmental and economic impact of food loss and waste via effective measuring and monitoring to consciously take the right action to eliminate food waste, save money and save the environment.