This Year’s Three UN Summits Set the Stage for COP30 to Transform Food Systems

12 November 2024, Baku, Azerbaijan. FAO Director-General QU Dongyu and Ismahane Elouafi, EMD of CGIAR attend the inauguration of the Food and Agriculture Pavilion FAO/CGIAR during COP29. Credit: FAO/Alessandra Benedetti

By Aditi Mukherji and Cargele Masso
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 24 2024 (IPS)

This year has been a landmark one for climate and environment policy. Starting with the UN’s COP16 biodiversity talks in October, followed by the COP29 climate talks in November, and closing with the desertification COP16 in December, few years have offered such critical moments back-to-back.

This created an unprecedented opportunity to bolster food systems against climate change, improve their environmental impacts, and concretize support for smallholder farmers – some of the people most affected by climate change, land degradation, and biodiversity loss.

Across the summits, negotiators broadly agreed on the need to integrate food systems into the UN’s three environmental frameworks, a step in the right direction given the interconnectedness of food and agriculture, and the environment at large. However, to build on the flagship UAE Declaration on food systems at the COP28 climate talks in 2023, the global community must urgently ramp up financing and action to make good on the ambitious goals set.

In other words, the next 12 months to the COP30 climate talks in Brazil are critical for “walking the talk” of the COPs this year. To make the most of the opportunity for food systems to support environmental and climate goals, several steps are needed.

The first is increased investment into low-emissions technologies and innovations for food systems. This includes both investment into new and emerging solutions as well as financing for scaling up existing technologies.

Just as increased investment and support in recent decades led to a solar energy boom, causing the price of solar panels to fall sharply and became cheaper than fossil fuels, food systems need similar long-term and sustained investments. Channelling international finance towards agricultural research and development would accelerate and scale affordable, impactful, and clean technologies that curb emissions and enhance biodiversity while also supporting adaptation and rural livelihoods.

Green ammonia, for instance, is a promising new sector for food and agriculture. It reduces emissions from fertiliser production by utilising renewable energy sources, such as wind or solar power, to fuel the traditional Haber–Bosch process. But at present, green ammonia is more expensive than its fossil fuel-based alternative, and requires more research to achieve cost-effective production in the years to come.

Second, finance is urgently needed to cover the costs and potential short-term losses as farmers adopt low-emission, regenerative agricultural practices. The transition to sustainable agriculture is not without costs, and supporting countries and communities as they make this shift is essential to long-term implementation. For example, payment for ecosystem services, including carbon credits, is worth exploring and implementing.

As it stands, food systems receive only around 0.8 per cent of climate finance, totalling $28.5 billion average yearly. This is far from the estimated $212 billion needed annually to reduce food systems’ environmental footprint, which currently account for one third of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Increased finance in food systems represents a huge opportunity to bring the world back on track to reach climate targets.

The need for finance goes beyond just climate goals. There is also a need for increased finance for biodiversity to fully implement the Global Biodiversity Framework and land degradation neutrality. At the same time, these seemingly competing finance needs can be coordinated to make best use of resources to make progress across the board. Reducing and phasing out harmful subsidies and mobilizing financial resources to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem gains, both targets under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, are paramount to deliver on all three Rio Conventions.

Finally, harmonizing policy can help address this by optimizing the use of resources like finance. Improving policy coherence across climate adaptation and mitigation can help maximize impacts and reduce trade-offs.

For instance, there are currently different country-level policy frameworks to reduce emissions and protect biodiversity: Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs). While both acknowledge the interconnectedness between climate and biodiversity, their implementation has been fragmented and siloed. This means we are missing out on the “double-wins”, more often duplicating efforts and even undermining sustainability goals.

Integrating the three Rio Conventions on biodiversity, desertification, and climate is fundamental. Though they are separate frameworks, they cannot operate in siloes, especially regarding food systems, because they are deeply interconnected.

This includes improved coordination to minimize competition for resources like finance and transaction costs, while enhancing systems thinking.

Food systems offer an opportunity for just and fair climate action, simultaneously vulnerable and powerful when it comes to the impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. Given that next year will be a single-COP year, attention must return to the opportunities for food systems to reduce emissions and enhance biodiversity and ecosystem gains, at the same time as supporting a just transition to ensure we sustain not only the planet, but all humanity too.

Aditi Mukherji, CGIAR’s Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Impact Action Platform and IPCC author

Cargele Masso, Director of the CGIAR Impact Platform on Environmental Health and Biodiversity

IPS UN Bureau