The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has launched an Action Plan designed to support the implementation of its ambitious Strategy on Climate Change 2022-2031.
According to a statement on its website, the strategy, which was endorsed in June 2022 by its executive Council, envisages agri-food systems as sustainable, inclusive, resilient, and adaptive to climate change.
Global Agrifood Systems, which encompass the production of food and non-food agricultural products, as well as their storage, transportation, processing, distribution, marketing, disposal, and consumption, are currently responsible for about a third of total greenhouse gas emissions.
They are also one of the major victims of the climate crisis. But agrifood systems also offer many solutions for confronting the climate crisis, from building resilience and adaptation to mitigation and sequestration.
The Strategy aims to scale up the visibility, uptake, and investment in these solutions by contributing to adaptive, resilient low-emission economies “while providing sufficient, safe, and nutritious foods for healthy diets, as well as other agricultural products and services, for present and future generations, leaving no one behind.
Crucially, it recognizes that the time to act is now.
To guarantee the successful and timely implementation of the Strategy, FAO has developed an Action Plan based on discussions with its FAO Members, so as to ensure that it reflects their needs and priorities as closely as possible.
“FAO’s Strategy on Climate Change is our response to the worldwide challenge of tackling the impacts of the climate crisis, while aiming to address a broad range of interlinked challenges, including biodiversity loss, desertification, land and environmental degradation, the need for accessible, affordable renewable energy, and food and water security. This Action Plan will help implement agrifood system solutions to climate change from across all FAO areas of work, ensuring we are working as one FAO,” said FAO Director-General QU Dongyu.
The plan involves three pillars, advocacy at global and regional levels; policy support at the country level; and the scaling-up of climate action on the ground with local actors and vulnerable populations.
The UN agency is already stepping up its advocacy efforts in global fora. For example, FAO was recognized as a strategic partner of the COP27 Presidency, supported the agricultural track of the climate negotiations, and hosted a Food and Agriculture pavilion for the first time at the Climate Change Conference held in Sharm el-Sheikh in November 2022.
In terms of policy support to FAO Members, the Plan aims to intensify support in the elaboration and implementation of climate commitments, in particular the National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), and nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
FAO is active in this area with its Scaling up Climate Ambition on Land Use and Agriculture through nationally determined contributions and National Adaptation Plans (SCALA) program, which is currently active in 12 countries spread across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
