The 29th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that took place in Baku, Azerbaijan, has been referred to as finance COP.
The talks have seen negotiators argue back and forth as they try to secure better deals.
Kaveh Zahedi, director of the Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment at the Food and Agriculture Organization, talks to environment reporter Gilbert Koech, on FAO’s expectations and what the talks mean to the food systems.
Excerpts:
This COP has been referred to, as finance COP. How critical is it to what FAO is doing?
So my expectation is countries will come out of this COP with something around the magnitude of finance needed. Finance is needed from public sources, private sources, from multiple sources, to be able to confront climate change. But for us at FAO, our particular interest is not only how much, but also where does that finance go?
Because the analysis that we have done shows that right now, if you look at climate finance, public and private, at the project level, only about four per cent is going to agrifood system solutions, right.
And these are solutions like agro-forestry, sustainable aquaculture, sustainable fisheries, sustainable livestock, restoration of degraded agricultural land, improvements in water systems and irrigation, all of these, these agro-food system solutions that bring multiple benefits, benefits in terms of course, climate change and building resilience and adapting to climate change, but also they have multiple benefits.
Some interventions can help reduce emissions some interventions can help with land degradation, with the sustainable use of biodiversity, and importantly, food security, because the picture on food security across the globe is not a good one either.
So that’s how we see the global conversation here of finance needs to link in, not just to how much, but where should it go. And for us, agriculture and food systems offer the best channel of investment with multiple benefits, and we’ve got to make sure that finance is fl owing not only to these agrifood system solutions.
What has been the impact of climate change on food system?
We’re already seeing major impacts of climate change on food systems. There is a reduction in yields, we are seeing increase in pests and disease and interestingly, we are seeing changes and reductions in the nutritional value of foods. And of course, we’re seeing all of this, the climate variability.
The floods, the droughts, the hurricanes, the typhoons, all of the climate variability, the extreme climate events that are increasing in frequency and impact.
They bring huge uncertainty to farmers and to agricultural communities as they wipe out the entire harvest.
They wipe out all the development gains, really, that these communities have managed to get for themselves over the past couple of decades, so already with some big impacts. And if the trajectories are correct, and all of the reports that we see coming from the UN Environment Programme, World Meteorological Organization, points to the fact that we are not slowing down.
The emissions are increasing. We are heading towards a 1.5 degree world all of this will mean greater impact, especially on agriculture, and especially on the agricultural communities that so depend on it, which means we’re undermining, again, development.
Because we’re undermining the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), we’re undermining Zero Hunger project, we’re undermining our poverty goals.
Small-scale producers produce the majority of the world’s food. What needs to be done to ensure that they produce more without compromising on the environment?
What we’ve seen is a double picture, because we’ve looked at the numbers of people living in hunger, and there are about 730 million people today that are still living in hunger, and this number increased during Covid-19 and it hasn’t gone down since then.
And the causes, of course, it has to do with climate change, with conflict, with the economic downturn. But what we’ve noticed is that these numbers are not even across the world, because about 730 million people living in hunger is about one in nine people across the world. But in Africa, it’s much more acute.
It’s about one in five people. So we’re seeing much greater incidents of hunger. So these investments that you and I have been talking about, it’s not just about climate, it is really about lives and livelihoods.
Millions around the world depend on livestock sector to earn a livelihood. The sector has however been accused for greenhouse gas emissions.
What needs to be done to balance livelihoods and emissions? At FAO, we talk about healthy diets for today and tomorrow. That means we have to work on balanced nutrition. You can’t have one solution fits all for the whole world on any of these, whether it’s livestock or any part of the agrifood system.
You have to look at country by country to establish what their nutritional situation is, their food security and the opportunities are.
When we looked at countries, nationally determined contributions, the NDCs, what we’ve noticed is that agriculture is mentioned in almost every single NDC. en translate that into specific targets, both on adaptation side and on the mitigation side, and one of the areas where they undervalue agriculture and food systems, and the contribution agrifood systems can make to a country’s ambition is certainly on livestock.
There is room to do much more on livestock for reducing those emissions that that countries are trying to address.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Gu- terres has been pushing to ensure that countries are covered by early warning systems. How crucial is this to FAO? Early warning systems play a crucial role in agriculture and communities.
At FAO, we’ve been developing tools to make sure that we put into the hands of farmers the right technology to have early warning of what is happening, not just in terms of, you know, the flood that’s coming, but also in terms of the slow onset events, right to the longer-term events like droughts, possibly to El Nino or La Nina, that are getting more and more acute.
We’re helping to support farmers to change the way they produce
their food, build resilience, including in fisheries. We are working
exactly on early warning for all.
And for us, the most important
customer of early warning for all is
the farmer.
