Environment

Agri-Food ESG Beyond Decarbonization — New Evaluation Perspectives Suggested by Planetary Boundaries —

2026.9.7

Corporate sustainability efforts have traditionally focused on the measurement and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. In recent years, however, companies have increasingly been expected not only to address climate change, but also to understand how their business activities affect the natural environment and how changes in nature may affect their own operations.

This is particularly important for the agri-food sector, which is closely connected to natural systems such as water resources, soil, biodiversity, land use, fertilizers, and pesticides. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to explain the environmental impacts and value of products using CO₂ as the sole indicator.

This article introduces the concept of “Planetary Boundaries,” one way of understanding environmental issues from multiple perspectives. It also explains how this concept relates to the agri-food sector and what companies in this sector are now expected to consider.

Table of Contents

1 What are Planetary Boundaries?
2 The Relationship Between Planetary Boundaries and the Agri-Food Sector
3 Agri-Food ESG Is Expanding Beyond Decarbonization
4 From Food System-Level Discussions to Product- and Ingredient-Level Assessment
5 Visualizing the Environmental Value of Each Product from Multiple Perspectives
6 References

What are Planetary Boundaries?

Planetary Boundaries refer to the “environmental limits of the Earth” that humanity should not exceed in order to continue living safely on the planet. Within these limits, even if human activities affect nature to some extent, the Earth is considered able to remain within its original state of balance through negative feedback mechanisms and resilience, such as the absorption of emissions, ecosystem adaptation, and adjustments within food chains. However, once these limits are exceeded, positive feedback mechanisms may begin to operate, and the Earth system may shift to a different state in a large-scale, sudden, and potentially irreversible manner.

The concept of Planetary Boundaries was first proposed in a 2009 paper by a group of 28 scientists led by Dr. Johan Rockström (*1). The paper identified the following nine areas:

Climate change
Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere and the energy balance between the Earth and outer space
Novel entities
Pollution caused by chemical compounds, including plastics
Stratospheric ozone depletion
The concentration of ozone in the stratosphere
Atmospheric aerosol loading
The amount of air pollutants in the atmosphere
Ocean acidification
The concentration of carbonate ions in the ocean
Biogeochemical flows
The flow of artificially produced nitrogen and phosphorus, mainly from chemical fertilizers, into oceans and soils
Freshwater change
The amount of freshwater available for human use and the amount of water taken up by plants
Land-system change
The extent of forest area
Biosphere integrity
The degree to which ecosystem functions are maintained and the rate at which species become extinct

The figure below shows how close each area is to its boundary and whether it has already exceeded that boundary. “The Planetary Health Check” is conducted annually to assess whether each of the Planetary Boundaries has been crossed.

Figure 1: The 2025 update to the Planetary Boundaries. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Credit: “Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Sakschewski and Caesar et al. 2025.” (*2)

In this way, companies are increasingly expected to understand and address the environmental impacts of their services and products from multiple perspectives, not only from the perspective of climate change, where regulatory developments have been particularly active in recent years.

The next section looks at the relationship between Planetary Boundaries and the agri-food sector.

The Relationship Between Planetary Boundaries and the Agri-Food Sector

The agri-food sector is deeply connected to the natural environment, which makes it necessary to understand its environmental impacts from multiple Planetary Boundaries perspectives.

Today, agriculture is not only a means of producing food. It is also a major driver of environmental instability at the global level. The 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission states that food systems are the single largest contributor to the transgression of the nine Planetary Boundaries (*3).

If technological innovation and additional mitigation measures do not progress sufficiently, environmental impacts from the food system are projected to increase by 50–90% between 2010 and 2050 due to population growth and rising income levels (*4). A single measure will not be enough to keep these impacts within planetary limits. Research concludes that it is essential to combine the following three types of action (*3):

Dietary shifts: Reducing meat consumption and shifting toward healthy, plant-based diets.

Improvements in agricultural technologies and management: Reducing waste in the use of fertilizers and water, while introducing technologies that improve production efficiency.

Reduction of food loss and waste: Cutting food waste in half across all stages, from production to households.

Going forward, companies in the agri-food sector will need to consider how they can contribute to these areas of action.

Agri-Food ESG Is Expanding Beyond Decarbonization

The concept of Planetary Boundaries is also relevant to corporate sustainability efforts. Until now, corporate environmental action has often focused on the measurement and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, commonly referred to as “decarbonization.” In recent years, however, companies have increasingly been expected to understand their relationship with the broader natural environment, including water, land, biodiversity, soil, fertilizer use and chemical substances.

One representative framework in this area is the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, or TNFD. TNFD is a framework that helps companies understand and disclose how they depend on nature, how they affect nature, and how these dependencies and impacts are connected to business risks and opportunities. In 2023, TNFD published its final recommendations for companies and financial institutions (*5).

The Science Based Targets Network, or SBTN, has also published methodologies for companies to set science-based targets for nature. SBTN covers target-setting related to freshwater and land, including water quantity and quality, nitrogen and phosphorus, and the protection and restoration of terrestrial ecosystems (*6).

These developments show that corporate sustainability efforts are expanding beyond the management of greenhouse gas emissions toward a broader understanding of companies’ relationships with natural capital. In other words, companies are increasingly expected to understand not only how much CO₂ they emit, but also where and on which forms of natural capital they depend and which local natural environments they affect.

In this context, ESG practices in the agri-food sector are shifting from a stage where companies address decarbonization at the corporate level to a stage where they need to understand environmental value and risk at the level of products, ingredients, and production processes. This is why agri-food ESG requires a broader perspective that goes beyond CO₂ alone.

From Food System-Level Discussions to Product- and Ingredient-Level Assessment

As discussed in the previous section, corporate sustainability efforts are expanding beyond decarbonization toward a broader understanding of companies’ relationships with natural capital. This shift is especially important in the agri-food sector. Food and agriculture are connected to a wide range of natural systems across the entire value chain, from ingredient production to processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal. These connections include water, land, biodiversity, fertilizer use, and pesticides.

Against this background, discussions in the agri-food sector are increasingly focusing not only on individual farms or factories, but also on the food system as a whole. The OECD defines food systems as encompassing all activities related to the food value chain as well as the associated economic, health, social, and environmental impacts (*7).

This perspective can also be seen in European policy discussions. The EU Farm to Fork Strategy, one of the core initiatives of the European Green Deal, aims to transform food systems into fair, healthy, and environmentally friendly systems (*8). The European Commission also emphasizes the importance of increasing the availability of sustainable food options and enabling consumers to choose healthy and sustainable diets more easily (*9).

There are also international scientific initiatives such as the EAT-Lancet Commission, which considers healthy diets and sustainable food production together. The EAT-Lancet Commission highlights the need to approach food from both human health and planetary environmental perspectives and to consider dietary patterns and food production in an integrated way (*10). The European Commission’s Knowledge for Policy platform also presents the Commission’s work as a reference for considering healthy and sustainable food systems (*11).

At the same time, it is not easy for companies to apply these food system-level discussions directly to their day-to-day business operations. To take practical action, food companies need to understand how their own products, ingredients, sourcing locations, and production processes relate to specific environmental issues. For example, greenhouse gas emissions may be the main issue for one product, while water use, land use, biodiversity, nitrogen and phosphorus impacts from fertilizers, or the effects of pesticides and chemical substances may be more important for another.

For this reason, food companies need to keep changes in the overall food system in mind while also understanding, at the practical level, which environmental issues are relevant to each product, ingredient, and production process. This forms an important foundation for communicating with business partners, developing products, improving sourcing, and making sustainability claims.

Visualizing the Environmental Value of Each Product from Multiple Perspectives

To understand environmental value and risk at the product and ingredient level, companies need to determine which environmental indicators to assess, what data to use, and how to communicate the results both internally and externally. Agri-food supply chains consist of many stages, including ingredient origin, cultivation methods, processing, transportation, packaging, and disposal. The most relevant environmental indicators can also differ depending on the product.

For this reason, understanding the environmental value of each product requires expertise in environmental assessment, life cycle assessment, agri-food supply chains, and international disclosure and evaluation frameworks. It is also important to organize the results in a way that can be used for internal business decisions, explanations to business partners, product development, and sustainability communication.

In response to these needs, cuoncrop’s “My-Eco-Ruler” is a support service designed to visualize the environmental value of agri-food products from multiple perspectives. In addition to greenhouse gas emissions, it supports the organization and analysis of product and ingredient-level environmental value by considering a range of indicators relevant to the agri-food sector, including water, land, biodiversity, fertilizer use, and chemical substances.

If your organization is interested in exploring these issues further, please feel free to contact cuoncrop.