Data scientist Hannah Ritchie provides a hopeful analysis by detailing historical progress related to halting climate change. This book is aimed at a general audience and strives to provide useful information that counters doomsday headlines of climate catastrophe. 

This year's State of Food and Agriculture report is the first in a two year focus on the true cost of food for sustainable agrifood systems. The report uses the true cost accounting approach to demonstrate the hidden environmental, health and social costs and benefits of the agrifood system, so that actors can make more informed choices that lead to transformative policies and decision making. 

Food loss and waste is thought to contribute to 24% of greenhouse gas emissions from the global food system, which amounts to 6% of total emissions. It is generally assumed that if food loss and waste were to decrease, less food would need to be produced, which would ultimately reduce associated environmental impacts. However, this study looks at an alternative scenario where reduced food loss and waste causes a ‘rebound effect’ in which the resultant price decreases cause an increase in consumption.

This paper compares the costs of various dietary patterns (including flexitarian, pescatarian, vegetarian, and vegan) in 150 countries. It also estimates diet-related healthcare costs for each diet as well as climate change costs. The cost of these alternative diets compared to current diets varies strongly by country as well as by whether healthcare and climate costs were included.

This report from the Rockefeller Foundation uses true cost accounting to assess the United States food system. It finds that (quantifiable) annual costs to health, the environment and biodiversity are US$3.2 trillion - around three times higher than US expenditure on food, which is US$1.1 trillion per year. The report finds that people of colour are disproportionately affected by negative impacts including non-communicable diseases, food insecurity, and air pollution exposure.

On 9 July 2021, TABLE and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food co-hosted an “Ask The Author” session with Carl Obst (IDEAA-group) and Lauren Baker (GA), discussing Chapter 1 "From Practice to Policy: New Metrics for the 21st Century", from the new 2021 book True Cost Accounting for Food: Balancing the Scale.

This book explains how True Cost Accounting - i.e. the practice of tallying up all of the environmental and social costs and benefits associated with the production of a good or service - can be used to reform the food system.

This report from the Food System Impact Valuation Initiative (FoodSIVI) at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute examines how the social impacts of food systems can be reported in monetary terms. It suggests that calculating the costs and benefits of food system interventions could help direct spending towards the most effective measures.

This report from the John Hopkins Centre for a Livable Future reviews the most prominent publications on True Cost Accounting, i.e. assessment of the externalities caused by an industry. It looks at how various True Cost Accounting frameworks can be applied to the food system.