To drive critical action to reduce food waste and achieve the targets for SDG 2 and 12.3 by 2030, we must fully grasp the scale of food waste. This triennial report tracking country-level progress to halve food waste by 2030 documents for countries the magnitude of the problem, and establishing a baseline for monitoring progress. The Food Waste Index Report helps comprehend global food waste across retail, food service, and household sectors. The 2021 report uncovered a greater availability of food waste data than expected, especially at the household level, and demonstrated that per capita household food waste generation was a global problem far bigger than previously believed.
The Food Waste Index Report 2024 builds on its predecessor in three key ways:
- It incorporates significantly expanded data from around the globe, providing much more robust global and national estimates, detailed in Chapter 2 of the main report.
- It expands on the SDG 12.3 food waste measurement methodology introduced in the 2021 report, offering improved guidance on measurement across retail, food service, and household sectors. This additional guidance explores various methodologies, their strengths and limitations, and strategies for prioritizing sub-sectors for measurement, as discussed in Chapter 3.
- The report shifts from solely focusing on food waste measurement to examining solutions for food waste reduction. This chapter delves into effective approaches to reducing food waste globally, with a particular focus on public-private partnerships in this 2024 report.
