Vital to make food innovation part of solution to climate crisis

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was unequivocal at the opening of the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow: “The longer we fail to act, the worse it gets and the higher the price when we are eventually forced by catastrophe to act.” 

COP26 is a unique opportunity for us all — governments, businesses, civil society, investors and financiers, youth groups, farmers, indigenous people — to drive breakthroughs that step up to the climate challenge and raise awareness of the new ideas we need to reach our ambitions for a nature-positive, food-secure world with net-zero emissions. 

Food, nature and climate are inextricably linked — particularly in Africa, which faces temperature rises faster than any other region on Earth. New alliances such as ClimateShot, which is led by the UK government and the CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, are helping to accelerate the development of new ideas and scaling of existing solutions to close the innovation gap and make food part of the solution to the climate and nature crises. 

It is absolutely imperative this happens. Global warming poses grave threats to nature and to food security — in a hotter, drier world, yields of staple crops are predicted to decrease and so is their nutritional density. So we would have less food and it would be of lower quality. Already, climate change has caused agricultural productivity to decrease by a fifth since the 1960s, and one in 10 people does not have sufficient food, with 811-million going hungry in 2020.

To provide everyone in Africa and around the world enough healthy and nutritious food we simply cannot afford to miss the targets set in the Paris Agreement. Yet food systems — how we produce, consume and dispose of foods — are currently one of the most significant drivers of climate change, generating about 30% of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the biggest cause of nature loss. If we adopt nature-positive production practices at scale, transition to healthier and more sustainable diets and halve food loss and waste from farm to fork, food systems will support thriving biodiversity and could even become net-GHG sinks.

Food systems can be part of the solution. Research and innovation are critical to realising this potential of food systems. Farmers, fishers and indigenous groups are some of our most important environmental stewards — we can learn from traditional production practices, leveraging agro-ecological and regenerative agriculture principles but we need financial innovation to enable their implementation at scale. 

Our food producers must be incentivised to use, and rewarded for using, nature-positive production practices. Agri-food supports and subsidies must be repurposed to this end, while private financing models must also be developed to make capital readily available to responsible food producers. 

We also need governments and the private sector to increase global investment to deliver more farming technologies, and methods that limit emissions and restore nature. Meanwhile, a significant amount of investment in food systems needs to be focused on demand-side solutions, to help shift consumption patterns. The recent UN Food Systems Summit demonstrated the importance of bringing together an alliance of governments, international institutions, private-sector leaders, impact investors and civil society groups.

At COP26, ClimateShot is uniting these groups behind an action agenda for innovation in agriculture. It has the backing of government ministries or national research institutes from 18 major food-producing countries — including Ethiopia, Nigeria, Uganda, Madagascar, Tanzania, Lesotho, Guinea, Ghana and Morocco — and counts more than 150 major organisations as allies, including WWF and the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (Sacau).

The ClimateShot four-point plan has the potential to rapidly accelerate investment in research and technological, financial and social innovation that ensures food systems become leading contributors to limiting global warming to a maximum of 1.5°C. We have to forge more consensus around the evidence of what works, with inclusive dialogue to ensure that evidence is used to guide policy and action.  

We must build food systems in Africa and worldwide for a stable climate. We have already entered the decade of action. Now is the time to deliver the innovation breakthrough that will save our nature, people and planet.   

• Sunga is Sacau CEO, and Campari is global leader of food practice at the WWF.