While how to achieve food systems transformation may not yet be clear to many countries, the fact that it needs to happen is - and the summit did succeed in setting several new mechanisms in motion.

Rome, Italy - As United Nations secretary-general António Guterres declared on 28 July that "the era of global boiling has arrived", with July set to be the hottest month since temperature records began, the UN's second Food Systems Summit (UNFSS+2) came to a close in Rome. Three days of intense meetings, panel discussions and dialogues involving 2,000 participants from 180 countries at the headquarters of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded with FAO director-general Qu Dongyu calling on all countries to accelerate their work on transforming food systems, which play a huge role in causing - and potentially alleviating - climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, freshly alarming levels of global hunger and malnutrition.

The fact that "food systems are broken" was no secret at this meeting (these were Guterres's words when he opened the summit), and discussions flowed frankly and freely about the reversal in global progress on alleviating hunger, the challenges and opportunities in implementing the sorely needed changes to global and national food systems, and the huge damage wrought to human health and to Earth's environment by food systems that function primarily for profit, not for people.

Food systems contribute about 12% to...