The 2050 Criteria

Guide to Responsible Investment in Agricultural, Forest, and Seafood Commodities

The 21st century has presented humanity with an ominous reality. By 2050, we may face widespread insufficiency of food, fiber, and bioenergy to meet our needs. A rapidly growing global population, accelerating consumption, dietary shifts, climate change and other factors are driving unprecedented price volatility, resource shortages, and other risks in soft commodity supply chains. These challenges pose material, reputational, and systemic risk to investors.

The 2050 Criteria seeks to untangle this complexity. Providing distilled guidance based on leading industry practice, The 2050 Criteria is designed to serve as a field guide for investors to access mainstream agricultural, forest, and seafood commodities in a responsible manner.

The 2050 Criteria provides a framework to identify responsible practices in key soft commodity sectors around the globe, including:

These commodity supply chains play key roles in meeting humanity’s growing demands while simultaneously generating some of the largest and most irreversible impacts on communities and ecosystems around the world, including biodiversity loss, watershed disruption, climate change, and social conflict. Financial institutions play a unique role in helping to establish the rules of the game and making daily operations possible. By deploying credible, mainstream criteria for responsibly indentifying and guiding investees, financial institutions can improve performance, manage risk, and help contribute to the economic and environmental sustainability of these crucial sectors.

For each soft commodity sector, The 2050 Criteria outlines:

Key features of the global market, including trade data and dynamics
Primary environmental and social risks
Key Performance Criteria for managing environmental and social risks
Leading third-party certifications
Major trends and opportunities
Links for additional tools and resources

Food security, and its attendant social, environmental, and economic consequences, is the challenge of the 21st century. The 2050 Criteria provides a tool and an entry point – including Key Performance Criteria – for investors to identify responsible players and projects. If finance, industry, and civil society align around credible indicators, we can help ensure that Earth meets humanity’s current demand without compromising the prospects for human development and functioning markets in the coming decades.

Overview Key Performance Criteria