“You can’t solve the climate crisis without solving hunger, and you can’t solve hunger without solving the climate crisis.”
This is a thought that Dr. Jennifer Burney comes back to often. For most of her career, she has worked at the nexus of climate and food security. Both her ongoing research and her 2024 residency at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center (Bellagio Center) focus on creating a future with both a stable climate and a more resilient food system.
Climate change and hunger are linked issues. Agriculture contributes upwards of a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, and more than 150 million children go to bed hungry every night. Solutions like regenerative agriculture and stronger social safety nets allow us to address both – lowering emissions and improving food production. So how do we get the public, agricultural, and environmental sectors to embrace them?
To Dr. Burney, a professor of Earth system science and deputy director of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, one of the answers lies in a surprising place: school cafeterias. School meals provide a critical source of nutrition to half a billion children every day. As an effective tool for fighting hunger and a major, government-led driver of food purchases in every corner of the planet, they are an ideal vehicle to support the adoption of regenerative agriculture and other climate resilience strategies.
In early 2025, The Rockefeller Foundation unveiled a $100 million “Big Bet” to provide nutritious, locally and regeneratively grown school meals to 100 million children over five years. Dr. Burney’s team is supporting this effort, examining decades of data to determine how climate change could disrupt school food programs and how they can be made more resilient. They found that climate change has reduced the number of school meals that Ethiopia can produce every year by about 150,000, while regenerative agriculture practices would enable them to produce an additional 240,000 annually.
Dr. Burney’s research is helping to demonstrate these benefits, and the framework she began developing during her Bellagio Center residency provides a map for how we can realize the vision of a zero-hunger, net-zero-agricultural emission world. We talked to her about why fighting hunger and climate change go hand-in-hand, the promise of regenerative school meals, and how her Bellagio residency cohort helped advance her work.
The people growing food, the people trying to feed kids, and the people who want to create a stable food safety net - everybody's pretty reasonable and aligned. There's a tremendous opportunity for collaboration.
Dr. Jennifer BurneyDeputy DirectorStanford Center for Food Security & the Enviornment
What will it take to get people past the binary view that you can solve hunger or climate change but not both?
There’s more alignment than you’d assume. The conflict gets overblown when talking heads start talking. Farmers are deeply attuned to and appreciative of their environment. There’s nobody who’s more climate exposed. If they’re faced with a choice between deforesting land and having their animals die or not feeding their families, they’ll do what they have to do. But most see themselves as stewards of the planet.
There are issues that need to be solved, of course. For example, you have people calling for a complete end to deforestation, but when people who live at the margins of native habitats are food insecure, they often have to convert other habitats to cropland. When you get down to the people growing food, the people trying to feed kids, and the people who want to create a stable food safety net, everybody’s pretty reasonable and aligned. There’s a tremendous opportunity for collaboration.
What makes regenerative school meal production such a useful tool for fighting hunger and climate change?
A huge proportion of the world’s population get a lot of their nutrition at school. That’s particularly true of people in vulnerable situations. At the same time, school food programs are also very powerful in the market. They have big public procurement programs, and when big actors make decisions about what they’re going to purchase, those changes often ripple across the entire market. It’s like when Walmart decided to carry organic produce. That completely transformed the landscape of production in the United States.
Study after study shows that healthy school meals improve attendance, school performance, health outcomes, and more. People understand that supporting them is good not just for kids but for society as a whole.
What has your research found about the impact of climate change on school meals?
Every place on earth is experiencing some changes in their climate, such as changing temperatures, rainfall levels, or more extreme weather. Those changes are already affecting the costs and production of school meals. The good news is that we think implementing regenerative agricultural practices and other climate resilience strategies will more than make up for those effects.
My research group helps people understand the connection between climate and school meals by looking systemically at risk and comparing data on resilience opportunities. We have developed a library of information on the impact of climate change on a broad set of foods, and we use it to determine the climate risk on a given school meal plate. What foods are being served and where are they produced? How does climate affect procurement strategies? How would costs and yields be affected if – for example – producers transition to regenerative practices?
Research around the world has shown that regenerative practices generally increase yields and make production more stable, both of which are appealing to farmers and large public procurement programs. Everybody benefits.
What will it take to get countries around the world to adopt regenerative practices and create a zero-hunger, net-zero-agriculture-emissions future?
During my Bellagio Center residency, I worked on a framework for how climate change mitigation and efforts to end hunger can progress hand-in-hand. It has several goals, including defining what we mean by a zero-hunger, net-zero-agricultural-emissions future and examining the idea that food systems and their land should be treated as a public good. Most farmers produce food for other people, but they have to shoulder the risks alone. How do we rethink that?
The framework also included pilots that we’re trying to get off the ground. As some examples: Our solar dryer program enables farmers to quickly and hygienically dehydrate produce, reducing spoilage and extending the marketable season. Will that help avoid food loss and waste? On the physical climate side, our group has shown that crop-growing regions that depend on moisture evaporated from the land, rather than the ocean, are more sensitive to climate change. Can we use that knowledge to target which sources of moisture are most important to conserve? When we think more broadly, Deforestation and land-use changes also only account for about half of food-system emissions; the rest are from very hard-to-reduce sources. What can we do about them? How low can we truly go?
How did your Bellagio Center residency help to move your work forward?
It’s such a small thing, but we were so well taken care of there. I had kids as a postdoc, so I’ve never had academic life without having to think about what’s for dinner or who’s doing laundry. It created the space to go deep on my work.
The best part was being around so many wonderful people. I had an incredible cohort. We’re all still very close – lifelong friends. We went on all these weekend hikes, ate dinner together. Everybody got so much out of the group. Neil Saintilan is a mangrove expert, and we had a great time looking at the places where our work intersects. Mariana Mazzucato has done a lot of work on policy, doing the nuts-and-bolts work of getting public procurement to adopt standards. She would ask me, “How do you fold the climate risk piece into the work?” And I would respond, “How do you get people to care?”
What tied everybody together was just this idea of a caring economy and caring political systems. Andrew Kassoy, who I connected very closely with, passed away recently. He worked in the private sector, figuring out how to establish public benefit corporations with double bottom lines that they’re accountable for. I can’t think of anybody who’s had a bigger impact on the world in terms of creating those things.
It was really special to be there with all of them. We were from science, policy, and the private sector, and all of us were all thinking about the same things. We all want a state that cares.
Burney’s work is driven by the power of “and” over “or.” We don’t have to choose to have enough to eat or a safe planet on which to live. We don’t have to side with producers, communities, or the environment. When we discover our shared needs and interests, we can create solutions that result in a better world for everyone. “That’s what makes me so excited to work on regenerative school meals,” Burney said. “Everyone gets why they’re important. It’s great to work together on an issue where there’s real alignment.”
Learn More:
- Watch Dr. Burney’s presentation on the relationship between climate change and global food security.
- Read about Dr. Burney’s work to create a zero-hunger, zero-agricultural-emissions future in this profile from Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability.
- Learn about The Rockefeller Foundation’s investments in regenerative school meals.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. The Rockefeller Foundation is not responsible for and does not endorse its content.