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

Opinion by Cargele Masso, Aditi Mukherji (nairobi, kenya)Tuesday, December 24, 2024Inter Press Service

This created an unprecedented alternative to bolster meals techniques in opposition to local weather change, enhance their environmental impacts, and concretize help for smallholder farmers – a few of the folks most affected by local weather change, land degradation, and biodiversity loss.

Throughout the summits, negotiators broadly agreed on the necessity to combine meals techniques into the UN’s three environmental frameworks, a step in the correct route given the interconnectedness of meals and agriculture, and the surroundings at massive. Nonetheless, to construct on the flagship UAE Declaration on meals techniques on the COP28 local weather talks in 2023, the worldwide group should urgently ramp up financing and motion to make good on the bold targets set.

In different phrases, the following 12 months to the COP30 local weather talks in Brazil are essential for “strolling the speak” of the COPs this yr. To profit from the chance for meals techniques to help environmental and local weather targets, a number of steps are wanted.

The primary is elevated funding into low-emissions applied sciences and improvements for meals techniques. This consists of each funding into new and rising options in addition to financing for scaling up current applied sciences.

Simply as elevated funding and help in current a long time led to a photo voltaic vitality increase, inflicting the value of photo voltaic panels to fall sharply and have become cheaper than fossil fuels, meals techniques want comparable long-term and sustained investments. Channelling worldwide finance in the direction of agricultural analysis and growth would speed up and scale reasonably priced, impactful, and clear applied sciences that curb emissions and improve biodiversity whereas additionally supporting adaptation and rural livelihoods.

Inexperienced ammonia, for example, is a promising new sector for meals and agriculture. It reduces emissions from fertiliser manufacturing by utilising renewable vitality sources, corresponding to wind or solar energy, to gas the standard Haber–Bosch course of. However at current, inexperienced ammonia is dearer than its fossil fuel-based various, and requires extra analysis to attain cost-effective manufacturing within the years to come back.

Second, finance is urgently wanted to cowl the prices and potential short-term losses as farmers undertake low-emission, regenerative agricultural practices. The transition to sustainable agriculture just isn’t with out prices, and supporting nations and communities as they make this shift is important to long-term implementation. For instance, fee for ecosystem providers, together with carbon credit, is value exploring and implementing.

Because it stands, meals techniques obtain solely round 0.8 per cent of local weather finance, totalling $28.5 billion common yearly. That is removed from the estimated $212 billion wanted yearly to scale back meals techniques’ environmental footprint, which at the moment account for one third of all international greenhouse fuel emissions. Elevated finance in meals techniques represents an enormous alternative to deliver the world again on observe to succeed in local weather targets.

The necessity for finance goes past simply local weather targets. There’s additionally a necessity for elevated finance for biodiversity to totally implement the World Biodiversity Framework and land degradation neutrality. On the similar time, these seemingly competing finance wants may be coordinated to make finest use of sources to make progress throughout the board. Lowering and phasing out dangerous subsidies and mobilizing monetary sources to reinforce biodiversity and ecosystem good points, each targets below the Kunming-Montreal World Biodiversity Framework, are paramount to ship on all three Rio Conventions.

Lastly, harmonizing coverage may also help deal with this by optimizing the usage of sources like finance. Enhancing coverage coherence throughout local weather adaptation and mitigation may also help maximize impacts and scale back trade-offs.

As an example, there are at the moment completely different country-level coverage frameworks to scale back emissions and defend biodiversity: Nationally Decided Contributions (NDCs) and Nationwide Biodiversity Methods and Motion Plans (NBSAPs). Whereas each acknowledge the interconnectedness between local weather and biodiversity, their implementation has been fragmented and siloed. This implies we’re lacking out on the “double-wins”, extra typically duplicating efforts and even undermining sustainability targets.

Integrating the three Rio Conventions on biodiversity, desertification, and local weather is key. Although they’re separate frameworks, they can not function in siloes, particularly relating to meals techniques, as a result of they’re deeply interconnected.

This consists of improved coordination to reduce competitors for sources like finance and transaction prices, whereas enhancing techniques considering.

Meals techniques provide a possibility for simply and honest local weather motion, concurrently susceptible and highly effective in relation to the impacts of local weather change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. On condition that subsequent yr will likely be a single-COP yr, consideration should return to the alternatives for meals techniques to scale back emissions and improve biodiversity and ecosystem good points, similtaneously supporting a simply transition to make sure we maintain not solely the planet, however all humanity too.

Aditi Mukherji, CGIAR’s Local weather Change Adaptation and Mitigation Impression Motion Platform and IPCC writer

Cargele Masso, Director of the CGIAR Impression Platform on Environmental Well being and Biodiversity

IPS UN Bureau

© Inter Press Service (2024) — All Rights ReservedOriginal supply: Inter Press Service

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