The COP28 climate negotiations generated welcome breakthroughs on both the urgent need to address the root causes of climate change – fossil fuels – and some glimmers of hope for climate justice for children.
As the ‘COP28’ climate negotiations in Dubai concluded, the final declaration agreed to by more than 190 countries and territories shows some serious strides forward, while many frustrations remain.
It’s right under our feet.
134 world leaders have signed up to the COP28 Declaration on agriculture, food and climate action. Endorsement of the Declaration will help in strengthening food systems, building resilience to climate change, reducing global emissions, and contributing to the global fight against hunger, aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Declaration – the first of its kind for the COP process - stresses the need for common action on climate change, which adversely affects a large portion of the world’s population, particularly those living in vulnerable countries and communities.
The roadmap identifies 120 actions and key milestones within ten domains, supported by evidence gathered by FAO over several years. These domains include clean energy, crops, fisheries and aquaculture, food loss and waste, forests and wetlands, healthy diets, livestock, soil and water, and data and inclusive policies — the latter two identified as overall systemic enablers.
From the numbers that defined the 28th U.N. Climate Change Conference to the pledges, people, and provocative thoughts that made it interesting, we have the COP lowdown in this special edition of the Newswire.
COP28’s Food, Agriculture and Water Day, 10 December, witnessed increased support for food systems transformation and cemented CGIAR’s key role in delivering that change through research and innovation.
Negotiators from around the world meeting at the COP28 climate conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) last week agreed to put more money behind pledges to cut methane pollution.
A much-anticipated road map to bring global agrifood systems in line with the 2015 Paris climate agreement while addressing hunger is a good start but doesn’t go far enough, particularly on curtailing emissions associated with food, experts say.
Brazil, Cambodia, Norway, Sierra Leone and Rwanda are united in their commitment to ‘whole of government’ approaches to transforming food systems so that they deliver better outcomes across five key themes: food and nutrition security; adaptation and resilience; equity and livelihoods; nature and biodiversity; and climate mitigation.
The Food 2030 pathways are being deployed via Horizon Europe, the EU’s framework programme for R&I (2021–2027), which provides funding to support a diversity of projects and initiatives, in Europe and beyond. It is important to note that the pathways, however, do not cover all of the thematic areas requiring EU investments in R&I related to food systems.
Transforming agriculture and food systems – which generate over a third of global emissions – is essential to limit global warming in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Weaning the world off industrial agriculture reliant on fossil-fuelled chemical inputs like pesticides and fertilisers is fundamental to that. The UN’s COP28 climate conference in Dubai in December presents a key moment of opportunity.
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The aim of this work is to develop a conceptual framework of the interactions between agroecological transitions and food systems through a literature review, and to highlight both the well- and under-studied interactions between both concepts. The general objective is to revisit current knowledge on the contribution of agroecology to the sustainability of food systems. It is expected to usefully assist and guide further researches relevant to the agroecological transition toward the sustainability of food systems.
A new global climate pact - the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan - was agreed at the COP27 summit in November 2022.
Climate finance to small-scale agrifood systems was strikingly low in 2019/20, at just USD 5.53 billion, far below the needs of producers and supply chain actors. This represents just 0.8% of total climate finance tracked across all sectors (USD 660.2 billion), and 19% of climate flows to agrifood systems as a whole (USD 28.5 billion).
There is no net zero without nature – the science in the latest IPCC report makes that abundantly clear.
Most people in crises prefer cash over other forms of assistance, so maximizing the use and the quality of CVA is about responding to people’s preferences – it’s also about achieving greater aid efficiency and effectiveness.
In 2022, the demand for humanitarian assistance grew larger than ever. There was an exceptional donor response to the unprecedented increase in the number of people in need – driven largely by the war in Ukraine as well as worsening crises in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa.
To make a dent in spiralling global hunger, the world must rapidly scale up protection for vulnerable people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) warned today, a week before world leaders meet in Dubai for the next UN Climate Summit, COP28.
