“The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food” (TEEBAgriFood), a new study launched by UN Environment on the occasion of World Environment Day 2018, demonstrates how to capture the complex reality of today’s diverse and intertwined “eco-agri-food” systems in order to evaluate their performance in a holistic manner to support decision-making, avoiding the risks and limitations inherent in simplistic metrics such as “per hectare productivity”.

Two key differences between a conventional, “production only” approach for assessing agricultural performance and the systems approach favoured by TEEBAgriFood is that the former is limited to the ‘production’ segments of food value chains, and to those stocks, flows, outcomes and impacts that are observable in markets and hence reflected in standard economic statistics.

The TEEBAgriFood ‘Scientific and Economic Foundations’ report addresses the core theoretical issues and controversies underpinning the evaluation of the nexus between the agri-food sector, biodiversity and ecosystem services and externalities including human health impacts from agriculture on a global scale. It argues the need for a 'systems thinking' approach, draws out issues related to health, nutrition, equity and livelihoods, presents a Framework for evaluation and describes how it can be applied, and identifies theories and pathways for transformational change.

TEEB-Agri-Food has developed an Evaluation Framework for evaluating food and agricultural systems in a holistic manner that reflects ‘systems thinking’, i.e., one which is:
1) comprehensive in that it addresses not just on-farm production functions but also all significant externalities of a system, be they positive or negative,
2) universal in that it is one common framework for evaluations by different decision-makers from their distinct perspectives and different influences on food systems, and
3) value-chain based in that it recognizes value-chain links and causalities, supporting evaluation of impacts from upstream inputs to production to markets, processing, distribution and consumption, including impacts on human health.

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) is a global initiative focused on “making nature’s values visible”. Its principal objective is to mainstream the values of biodiversity and ecosystem services into decision-making at all levels. It aims to achieve this goal by following a structured approach to valuation that helps decision-makers recognize the wide range of benefits provided by ecosystems and biodiversity, demonstrate their values in economic terms and, where appropriate, capture those values in decision-making.