Climate Action to Transform Food Systems
Linking the U.N. Food Systems Summit and COP26 through initiatives that support greater resilience to climate change
The climate crisis is a major threat to our food systems, undermining decades of progress in providing more nutritious diets to a growing global population. But it’s these very food systems which contribute to the global climate emergency — producing as much as a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Two key events took place in 2021 — the U.N. Food Systems Summit and the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Both events had the potential to produce mutually reinforcing commitments and action at the intersection of climate and food challenges. Although these conferences are highly aligned in terms of their goals, they did not systematically feed each other in a way that reinforces and amplifies their shared ambitions.
This paper looks at how food systems transformation is an essential aspect of climate action — and sets out how to align climate action with efforts to promote more sustainable food systems.
The revision of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) in preparation of COP26 offers a unique opportunity to set targets and initiatives that reduce the impact of unsustainable food systems on the global climate — and at the same time helps the agricultural and food sectors become more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Likewise, at the intersection of food systems transformation and climate action, a number of emerging and established climate risk reduction and management initiatives enable contributions to reduce risks in food systems that are aggravated and compounded by climate change — and protect the livelihoods of those who depend on these food systems.
This paper outlines how such initiatives offer vulnerable countries a broad pool of knowledge and tools to couple objectives of climate action and food systems transformation, as well as opportunities for global collaboration and engagement to develop NDCs that tackle both the climate and the food challenge we face in a mutually reinforcing way.
This paper was authored by: Peter Läderach, Gernot Laganda, Rhys Bucknall-Williams, Theresa Liebig, Alice Taylor, Alison Rose, Montserrat Barroso, Tuga Alaskary, Walter Baethgen, Ben Webster, Marc Dumas-Johansen and Tyler Ferdinand.