COP28: Agrifood most climate-affected sector but finance flows to it fell by 12% in 2021, reveals FAO

The story has been updated.

On December 10, 2023 a first-of-its-kind global roadmap for food systems to limit global temperatures rise within 1.5 degrees Celsius was unveiled at 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). At the same time, a new analysis revealed the amount of climate finance flowing to agrifood systems is “strikingly low” and continues to diminish compared to global climate finance flows.

The findings were revealed in a report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on December 10, 2023. The report follows another crucial one by FAO published in the first week of COP28, stating that agriculture was the most climate-affected sector globally, with 40 per cent of countries reporting economic losses explicitly linked to it. 

Between 2000 and 2021, the financial contributions amounted to $183 billion, with more than half of the funding delivered after 2016.

However, climate-related development financial support for agrifood systems is not just low, the analysis said. It plummeted to $19 billion in 2021, which is a 12 per cent decline compared to 2020. The most affected region was Asia, with a sharp drop of 44 per cent from 2020. Africa and Europe experienced a mild increase of 4 per cent, while Latin America and the Caribbean saw a modest increment of 6 per cent.

Climate finance refers to local, national or transnational financing — drawn from public, private and alternative sources of financing — that seeks to support mitigation and adaptation actions to address climate change. 

UNFCCC hosted its first ever Food, Agriculture and Water Day on December 10.

Earlier, over 150 world leaders signed the Emirates Declaration at COP28, committing to integrating food into their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) or generally called climate plans, by 2025. This is the first time in UN climate talks that countries have made a clear commitment to take action on the global food system. 

Aditi Mukherji, director, Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Impact Action Platform of global partnership CGIAR, said, while the declaration shows there is appetite for food systems transformation, it has been hard to include food systems in the formal negotiations. 

Agrifood failed to find a mention in the global stocktake draft or in the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) draft text. 

Meanwhile, India stayed away from the Emirates Declaration. “There is this willingness to be a part of this change. On the other hand, there is legitimate reluctance to sign on to something that may end up jeopardising their food security, particularly among the global south,” Mukherji told DTE.

Although there has been an overall global increasing trend in absolute terms since 2000, doubling from $9 billion allocated in 2010 to $19 billion in 2021, the growth rate of climate-related development finance towards agrifood systems fell significantly short of the average growth rate of three to four times observed in climate-related development finance overall. 

FAO Deputy Director General Maria Helena Semedo called this trend a missed opportunity.

Semedo said:

The unique potential of agrifood systems to tackle the climate crisis can only be realised by scaling up investments in agrifood systems solutions and actions. The diminishing trends of both agrifood and adaptation investments are a missed opportunity to equip farmers around the world with the knowledge, the much-needed technologies and innovation to enhance their resilience and adapt to climate change impacts.

Global roadmap at COP28

Meanwhile, a first-of-its-kind global roadmap for food systems was unveiled at COP28 on December 10, 2023 setting out the shifts and timetables needed in food and farming to end hunger and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

It outlined a comprehensive strategy spanning the next three years across ten priority areas — clean energy, crops, fisheries and aquaculture, food loss and waste, forests and wetlands, healthy diets, livestock, soil and water, and data and inclusive policies. Reforming the world’s food systems will be a key step in limiting global temperature rises to staying within 1.5°C warming. 

While agriculture and livestock farming are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions, food production is also highly vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis. 

The roadmap made an important distinction between the Global North and South by recommending reducing overconsumption of animal-based products in the rich world, curbing food waste and overuse of fertilisers and capturing carbon in soil to bring the global agrifood industry in line with the Paris Agreement.

“The FAO roadmap gets into the heart of what we at CGIAR are contending with in the food space. We know that food systems need to reduce emissions but we also know that we have to do that without compromising food security, especially from a Global South perspective. The 1.5°C pathway and United Nations-mandated Sustainable Development Goal 2 (goal to end hunger and malnutrition) need to go together,” said Mukherji.

On the emissions front, it aimed  to reduce agrifood systems’ methane emissions by 25 per cent by 2030 relative to 2020, achieve carbon neutrality by 2035, and transform them into a carbon sink by 2050, capturing 1.5 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.

This is the first edition of three. While it is non-binding, it has the potential to guide governments and businesses and hold them accountable, akin to the role played by the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero roadmap. 

Food systems and climate experts, however, said that this was not enough and the roadmap fails to target fossil fuels. 

Patty Fong, programme director at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, told Down To Earth: “To make food systems truly sustainable, we must commit to phasing out fossil fuels from farm to plate — not simply reducing their impact. For example, the Roadmap recommends improving the efficiency of fertiliser use instead of unequivocally calling for a wholesale shift towards sustainable farming practices (such as agroecology and regenerative agriculture). “

Currently, food systems account for at least 15 per cent of fossil fuels burned each year.  

Additionally, Fong demanded that grassroots producers — particularly smallholder farmers, women and Indigenous communities — must be included in all discussions, including the modelling of pathways for global food systems’ transformation. 

Emile Frison, International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, said the roadmap puts a huge emphasis on incremental improvements to the current flawed industrial food system. “This is a flawed system that is wrecking nature, polluting the environment, and starving millions of people. These efficiency-first proposals are unlikely to be enough to get us off the high pollution, high fossil fuel and high hunger track we’re on,” he said.

Frison called for proposing a real transformation of the status quo by putting much more emphasis on diversification, shorter supply chains and agroecology, and on tackling the “massive power inequalities imposed by the handful of companies that define what we grow and eat” in the next stages of this process. 

In the context of regenerative agriculture and agroecology, Mukherji was of the view that these solutions can’t be universal. “There are still regions like Africa where the yields are one tenth of their potential. So you would have to have sustainable intensification. At the same time, places where yields have reached maximum potential and chemical usage is out of balance, those have to move towards regenerative agriculture and agroecological approaches.”

A new ‘Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation’, with a focus on delivering universal access to affordable, nutritious, and sustainable diets, was also launched on December 10 morning at COP28 by five countries — Brazil, Cambodia, Norway, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda — with the aim of developing a “gold standard” approach to transforming national food systems in line with tackling climate change and world hunger. 

The alliance members must agree to update their NDCs and national climate adaptation and biodiversity strategies to integrate these food system efforts by 2025 and report annually on progress towards their goals.

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