The third session of the Our Urban Future series, co‑organized by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the City Diplomacy Lab, examined how cities can accelerate food waste prevention and reduction as a lever toward more sustainable, equitable, and circular urban food systems. Moderated by Lorenzo Kihlgren Grandi, Founding Director of the City Diplomacy Lab, the event brought together city practitioners from three continents alongside UNEP’s global food systems team for a structured exchange of concrete practice and forward-looking strategy.
Clementine O’Connor, Sustainable Food Systems Programme Manager at UNEP, opened with the global context. UNEP’s work on sustainable food systems operates across three interconnected areas: food waste and methane mitigation; food systems for climate and nutrition; and food systems on the ground, with a focus on policy coherence at national and subnational levels. Cities, she argued, sit at the center of all three — as hubs of food consumption, innovation, and waste management, and as the places where food waste prevention can most readily be put into practice through food sharing, redistribution, upcycling, and composting. The stakes are significant: 30 to 40 percent of the urban population in low-income countries currently faces food insecurity, while 19 percent of available food goes to waste. The UNEP Food Waste Index confirms that this is a global problem — household per capita food waste is remarkably consistent across high, upper-middle, and lower-middle income countries, with over one billion tonnes wasted in 2024. Yet food waste reduction is also a low-risk, high-impact climate solution, with a return on investment of 8 to 1 for city governments — rising substantially when household benefits are included. O’Connor illustrated city-level action through the example of Rio de Janeiro, where UNEP is supporting a citywide food waste reduction strategy implemented through integrated interventions in schools, with retail partners, in markets, and in the hotel sector, alongside circular urban food hubs that bring together urban and peri-urban agriculture, zero-waste cooking, and decentralized composting. She closed by introducing the Food Waste Breakthrough, launched at COP30, which links SDG target 12.3 — halving food waste by 2030 — to the Global Methane Pledge, supporting cities and food businesses through capacity building, knowledge sharing, data and policy assistance, and access to climate finance. The initiative is led by three country champions — Brazil, Japan, and the United Kingdom — and includes Dar es Salaam among its participating cities.
Full Session Recording
Round 1: Urban Food Systems in Practice
The first panel asked each city representative to present a concrete best practice from their context, illustrated by a photo or map.
London: A Systemic Approach Across Government, Business, and Citizens
Rachel Shairp, Senior Advisor and Food and Packaging Lead at ReLondon — a partnership of the Mayor of London and the London boroughs focused on waste reduction and circular economy — opened with a neighbourhood-scale map to illustrate ReLondon’s core philosophy: meaningful change in food systems requires coordinated action across all levels simultaneously.
Shairp described three parallel streams of work. For local government, ReLondon has developed a voluntary food purchasing and waste reduction commitment covering all public institutions — schools, hospitals, canteens — with a 50 percent food waste reduction target and a mandatory baselining requirement. For citizens, its Eat Like a Londoner campaign deploys behavioral nudges to reduce household food waste, connecting food choices to both climate and cost. For businesses, ReLondon runs grant-and-advisory programs supporting small enterprises in trialing food waste prevention initiatives, alongside engagement with larger supply chain actors through a mayoral food supply chain roundtable.
Dar es Salaam: Inclusive Circularity Through Informal Worker Integration
Geophrey Zenda, Principal Environmental Health Officer in the Waste Management and Sanitation Unit of Dar es Salaam City Council, shared a photo that told two stories at once: of informal waste workers newly equipped with protective gear, and of a city choosing to formalize what had long been invisible labor.
Zenda explained that informal waste collectors had historically operated without recognition, coordination, or income security. Dar es Salaam made a deliberate policy choice to register more than 500 of these workers into formal groups operating across wards and markets, collecting segregated organic waste at source. That waste is now directed to decentralized composting hubs and black soldier fly units, producing soil nutrients for urban farming and protein feed for poultry — reducing dependence on imports while cutting methane emissions and flood risk. The city is also embedding composting in schools as a behavioral change tool. Zenda’s framing was pointed: food waste is not only an environmental issue. It is a social justice issue, and when cities empower their people, waste becomes opportunity.
Abu Dhabi: Smart Redistribution at Scale
Jelena Milicevic Lefavrais, Sustainability Manager at the Ne’ma National Food Loss and Waste Initiative, chose a photo of community smart fridges — and used it to explain a systems approach that spans measurement, redistribution, behavioral change, and multi-stakeholder governance.
Since its launch, Ne’ma has helped redistribute nearly 3 million meals and diverted more than 2.5 million kilograms of food waste from landfill. The smart fridges — located in communities, ports, shopping malls, and around the Abu Dhabi Exhibition Centre — create a daily redistribution infrastructure that connects hotel surpluses, catering companies, event organizers, and low-income communities. The logistics model was developed to solve a real operational problem: many food banks cannot viably collect small quantities from dispersed locations, so Ne’ma centralized fridges in areas of high donor density to make collection both efficient and low-carbon. In parallel, Ne’ma conducted the UAE’s first national food loss and waste baseline study — an 18-month project with more than 2,600 participating organizations — creating a unified measurement methodology aligned with UNEP and FAO standards and enabling the country to set evidence-based targets.
Round 2: Visions for the Future
Each panelist was then asked to name a single keyword capturing their city’s approach and explain what it represents.
Abu Dhabi — Ne’ma (blessing): Jelena Milicevic Lefavrais chose the name of the initiative itself. In Arabic, ne’ma means blessing — a value, she explained, that is deeply embedded in Emirati culture, where food has historically been understood as a resource to be shared, never wasted. Ne’ma’s work is rooted in this cultural foundation while translating it into measurable policy: behavioral nudges in hospitality settings have achieved over 60 percent food waste reduction in pilot sites, and the initiative operates across five strategic pillars — behavioral change, measurement, policy, innovation, and collaboration — with the goal of becoming a nation where no food is wasted.
Dar es Salaam — Resilience: Geophrey Zenda offered a definition of resilience that moved well beyond the technical. Resilience, in Dar es Salaam’s practice, has three dimensions: environmental (diverting organic waste reduces methane emissions and flooding risk), economic (compost and black soldier fly products create local value chains and reduce import dependence), and social (formalizing informal workers builds equity and service coverage). “Resilience is not just a concept,” Zenda said. “It is a lived practice.”
London — Multifaceted: Rachel Shairp’s word captured ReLondon’s operating logic: no single lever changes a food system. Effective action requires working with local government, businesses, and citizens simultaneously, pulling on the full range of policy tools available at the city level — research, pilots, grants, campaigns, toolkits — to produce coordinated system-level change.
Discussion and Q&A
The Q&A drew questions from a global audience and ranged across four themes.
The connection between urban agriculture and food loss. Responses revealed sharply different city contexts. In Dar es Salaam, the priority is cold chain infrastructure — refrigerated transport and market storage — to reduce loss of perishable produce. In Abu Dhabi, cosmetic grading standards that exclude imperfect produce are a key driver of waste, and Ne’ma is working with government and the private sector to establish alternative grade B and C redistribution channels, alongside commodity-specific awareness campaigns targeting the most-wasted items identified in the national baseline study. In London, where only around 2 percent of food consumed is produced locally, the most relevant lever is redistribution — with ReLondon exploring AI-enabled matchmaking to connect food surpluses with redistribution partners more efficiently.
Behavioral change. Rachel Shairp described the evolution of ReLondon’s Eat Like a Londoner campaign — a multi-year initiative using behavioral nudges to shift household food waste habits, now focused specifically on prevention and reduction. Jelena Milicevic Lefavrais outlined Ne’ma’s progression from behavioral research to pilot interventions in hotel canteens — transparent waste bins, default messaging, daily trackers — achieving 40 percent food waste reduction in a 12-week trial, and eventually scaling the approach to 220 hospitality sites in the lead-up to COP28, where an 8-plus percent reduction was achieved simply through the provision of measurement tools. Geophrey Zenda described weekly city-wide clean-up campaigns in Dar es Salaam, school composting programs, and market-level segregation education.
Cooling infrastructure and governance. A question on who manages Dar es Salaam’s cold chain systems drew a clarification of the city’s dual model: transport refrigeration is handled by private sector partners, while cold storage in municipal markets is managed by city officials with support from installation partners.
Measurement. This emerged as one of the most technically demanding themes. Shairp acknowledged the difficulty candidly — measurement remains a challenge across all stakeholder groups — but noted that ReLondon’s approach is to lower the barrier to entry: any data, even imperfect and partial, is better than none, and voluntary commitments with baselining requirements create the momentum needed to start. Milicevic Lefavrais described Ne’ma’s experience building a national measurement methodology from scratch, training more than 2,600 participants to standardize reporting while accommodating the very different operational realities of farmers, retailers, and distributors. Zenda pointed to ongoing data integration challenges between city departments, universities, and investment partners, while highlighting two active projects — including one under the FCDO-supported Dar es Salaam Resilient Food Program — working to establish household and market baselines.
A final exchange on the logistics of Ne’ma’s fridge network prompted a candid reflection from Milicevic Lefavrais on the operational difficulty of food rescue at scale: the carbon implications of collecting small quantities from dispersed donors, the importance of centralized planning around donor density, and the years of capacity-building required to make the system function reliably.
Closing Reflections
Each speaker closed with a thought to carry forward.
Rachel Shairp returned to the session’s organizing logic: the need for coordinated, system-level thinking that brings together government, business, and citizens. Geophrey Zenda reiterated that food waste is a social justice issue and called on participants to pursue composting and organic waste valorization as tools for building resilient communities. Jelena Milicevic Lefavrais noted that, across very different city contexts, a shared ambition is visible — and that the knowledge exchange facilitated by UNEP is essential to translating that ambition into results. Clementine O’Connor closed by underscoring the power of data: cities that establish a measurement baseline are better positioned to set impactful targets and track progress over time, and the UNEP Food Waste Index provides a ready framework for doing so.
The Our Urban Future series continues on Wednesday, July 29, 2026, with a session on city diplomacy and the global mobilization against extreme heat. The draft program and the registration link are available here.
Explore past sessions in the series:
- Driving Change in Urban Mobility: How Digitalization Is Accelerating Low-Carbon Transport Across Cities (February 26, 2026)
- Delivering Local Climate Action: Insights from COP30 (December 1, 2025)
Published on May 8, 2026. Last updated on June 29, 2026.