The UK financial system still treats regenerative agriculture is ‘high risk’, writes Marc Palahi, CEO of the Circular Bioeconomy Alliance and chief nature officer at Lombard Odier
Last month, while fridges and freezer in major supermarkets were marked with printed notices as customers encountered empty aisles, University of Oxford professor Paul Behrens urged the government to act on the food security “crisis” he said the UK is facing, as he warned that extreme weather events will continue to send food prices skyrocketing.

His message comes one month after the Fourth UK Climate Change Risk Assessment flagged that climate change risks to agriculture and food systems as requiring “critical” attention. This stark warning is already affecting our economy: compounding nature and climate shocks are disrupting food prices, undermining supply security, and squeezing margins across the food value chain.

It is time to transform our current agri-food system so it becomes part of the solution, rather than a driver of the climate and nature crises, while supporting healthier diets and enhancing resilience. Regenerative agriculture, which is at the centre of the annual Groundswell festival which took place last week in the UK, offers us a unique opportunity to rethink our food systems in ways that centre around nature, planetary health and human health.

From sustainability narrative to financial reality
Last summer, a report by the European Investment Bank and Howden Insurance Group estimated that climate impacts such as droughts and flooding are already costing Europe’s agricultural sector around €28bn every year – and that figure could almost double over the next two to three decades under a business-as-usual trajectory. Concurrently, a new scientific study has identified more than 15 global food supply chains that have been significantly disrupted by extreme weather events driven by climate change in just the past four years.

In response, the narrative and responsibilities within major food companies are also changing fast – from treating nature degradation and climate change as sustainability-only issues to recognising them as fundamental economic risks. Chief financial officers are increasingly taking the lead. The reason is that ecosystem risks are now material financial risks, manifesting as price volatility, declining quality, disrupted throughput, and weakened supply chain resilience. The negative environmental externalities generated by conventional food systems – which account for around 30 per cent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and are linked to 80–90 per cent of global biodiversity loss – are now causing these systems to fail. The pressure is intensifying as geopolitical shocks drive up the cost of synthetic fertilisers. Conventional agriculture – dependent on fossil-based inputs while accelerating climate change and nature degradation – has reached its limits.

A regenerative approach – one that simultaneously manages the unavoidable and avoids the unmanageable – is not a new paradigm. It has existed for centuries in farming and Indigenous communities around the world. The difference is that now science and technology allow us for understanding the ecological principles behind it and accounting for the environmental and economic outcomes that it delivers. It is time for it to become mainstream and adopted at scale.

A resilient strategy for food value chains
Regenerative agriculture is a holistic approach designed to regenerate and restore the health, resilience, and long-term productivity of soils and the wider socio-ecological systems they support.

Read more: Regenerative agriculture is now a food security imperative

– Author: Marc Palahi, Circular Bioeconomy Alliance and Chief Nature Officer, Lombard Odier

– This contribution is brought to you by Lombard Odier, a valued diamond event partner of Building Bridges 2026.