The Climate Summit is starting to crack a tough nut: food emissions

It is difficult enough for world leaders to determine the future of coal, oil and gas in a warming world. What about the future of bread and milk?

The food system is responsible for about 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, from farm to fork to landfill, and is a major culprit in biodiversity loss. Smallholder farmers in poor countries, already on the brink of their livelihoods, are among the most vulnerable to climate hazards. And hunger has increased over the past three years as the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have upended the global food and energy supply chain. About 735 million people According to the World Health Organization, people are hungry today.

So how do we feed ourselves without further damaging the planet or exacerbating rising hunger? This year’s United Nations Climate Summit confronted this issue like never before.

“For the first time, there is broad recognition that the food agenda is aligned across the board with the climate fight,” said Ed Davey of the World Resources Institute, who worked with organizers of the summit, known as COP28, on the food agenda . .

That causes potential (food) fights. Changing the way the world eats is fraught with difficulties, perhaps as difficult as changing the way the world produces energy. Rising food prices can bring down governments. Farmers can be a powerful political lobby in countries as diverse as the United States and India. Changing dietary habits can be difficult, and the global trade in agricultural commodities is vast and influential.

However, this year’s climate summit took small but important steps.

More than two-thirds of the world’s countries have signed up to an agreement to reshape the global food system, even if it is vague, without concrete objectives and not binding. The United Nations Food Agency has released a landmark report outlining what is needed to align the global food system with the goal of limiting average global temperature increases to manageable levels. The United States and the United Arab Emirates have jointly committed about $17 billion to agricultural innovations to tackle climate change.

Not surprisingly, this year’s summit attracted a large number of food company executives. Multinational seed producers sought government support for new technologies. US dairy exporters tried a “positive story” about their industry. The North American Meat Institutewhich sent its representatives to the summit to highlight “the role of livestock farming in driving sustainability and food security solutions,” sponsored a panel to promote the nutritional value of animal protein.

The main push came from the Food and Agriculture Organization. Just as the International Energy Agency drew up a roadmap for the energy transition several years ago, so too has the FAO built a path last week towards aligning the global food system with global climate goals. The organization said this means cutting food waste in half and reducing methane emissions from livestock by 25 percent, both by 2030. It would also require planting a more diverse range of crops than the staples that fuel the global dominate agriculture.

The FAO roadmap means that we need to do different things in different countries. In North America, food experts say, this means pushing citizens to eat less meat and dairy products, which cause high emissions. In sub-Saharan countries this means increasing agricultural productivity. Every country must reduce food loss and waste.

“We are at a reckoning point where we need to move away from pure awareness and actually start changing habits,” said Yvette Cabrera, a food waste expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Of course, road maps are just that until someone starts following the directions. In this case it is up to the national governments. That’s where the Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action comes in. It requires countries to include agricultural emissions in their next round of climate targets, in 2025. It does not set any other targets or timelines, nor does it prescribe any specific policies.

So far, 154 countries have joined. India, which has long been sensitive to global agreements affecting food security, was an outlier.

One measure of the coming food battle is that it is unclear whether there is any willingness to include agricultural emissions targets in the main deal, which is currently being bitterly negotiated. The final draft does not contain them.