NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 24 (IPS) – This 12 months has been a landmark one for local weather and surroundings coverage. Beginning with the UN’s COP16 biodiversity talks in October, adopted by the COP29 local weather talks in November, and shutting with the desertification COP16 in December, few years have supplied such essential moments back-to-back.
This created an unprecedented alternative to bolster meals techniques in opposition to local weather change, enhance their environmental impacts, and concretize assist 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 best course 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 formidable targets set.
In different phrases, the subsequent 12 months to the COP30 local weather talks in Brazil are essential for “strolling the discuss” of the COPs this 12 months. To benefit from the chance for meals techniques to assist 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 present applied sciences.
Simply as elevated funding and assist in current a long time led to a photo voltaic power 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 inexpensive, 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 power sources, equivalent to wind or solar energy, to gas the normal Haber–Bosch course of. However at current, inexperienced ammonia is costlier than its fossil fuel-based various, and requires extra analysis to realize 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 is just not with out prices, and supporting international locations and communities as they make this shift is crucial 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 present account for one third of all world greenhouse gasoline emissions. Elevated finance in meals techniques represents an enormous alternative to deliver the world again on monitor 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 completely implement the World Biodiversity Framework and land degradation neutrality. On the identical 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 boost biodiversity and ecosystem positive factors, each targets underneath the Kunming-Montreal World Biodiversity Framework, are paramount to ship on all three Rio Conventions.
Lastly, harmonizing coverage might help handle this by optimizing the usage of sources like finance. Bettering coverage coherence throughout local weather adaptation and mitigation might help maximize impacts and cut back trade-offs.
As an example, there are at present 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 prime. Although they’re separate frameworks, they can not function in siloes, particularly concerning meals techniques, as a result of they’re deeply interconnected.
This consists of improved coordination to attenuate competitors for sources like finance and transaction prices, whereas enhancing techniques considering.
Meals techniques supply a possibility for simply and honest local weather motion, concurrently weak and highly effective in terms of the impacts of local weather change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation. Provided that subsequent 12 months will probably be a single-COP 12 months, consideration should return to the alternatives for meals techniques to scale back emissions and improve biodiversity and ecosystem positive factors, concurrently 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 Influence Motion Platform and IPCC creator
Cargele Masso, Director of the CGIAR Influence Platform on Environmental Well being and Biodiversity
IPS UN Bureau
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