This article was written by Lauren Baker, Deputy Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, and Rosinah Mbenya, Country Coordinator of PELUM-Participatory Ecological Land Use Management Association, based in Kenya. It was originally published in Context. 

How we feed the world through climate change is one the biggest challenges of our times but new data shows that funds are lacking. 

As the COP29 U.N. climate summit enters week two of negotiations in Baku, global leaders are working against the clock to finalise a new finance package to determine how much money will be delivered for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

If the world is to have a chance at halting and reversing the alarming acceleration of the climate crisis, developing countries and frontline communities, in particular, need more money to adapt to climate change and implement solutions to phase out fossil fuels.

A glance at recent headlines from around the world shows how severely the climate crisis is hitting food systems.

Droughts, floods, heatwaves, and storms have stacked the odds against smallholder farmers, fishers, pastoralists, and Indigenous peoples, putting livelihoods and food security at threat. Industrial agriculture is responsible for a third of global polluting emissions and around 15% of fossil fossils go into food systems each year.

But how much of public climate finance flows into transforming food systems?

A new report by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food reveals a concerning trend: While overall public climate finance doubled between 2017 and 2022 (from $321 billion to $640 billion), the portion of funding going towards food systems has fallen from 3% to 2.5% in the same time period.

Furthermore, sustainable food systems — practices based on agroecological and regenerative approaches — received only 1.5% of public climate funding.

More money, more access

Food is the basis of life on earth. How we produce, process, and consume food must be at the heart of solutions to address the climate crisis, yet climate funding for food systems is falling.

Committing more climate finance is only one part of the challenge. How much of the money actually reaches smallholders when they need it? One way would be to channel new funds through farmer organisations that can support a shift to agroecological practices. Policies that support community-led innovations alongside research and capacity building in agroecological approaches is crucial.

Access to water and traditional seeds varieties, and better implementation, monitoring and reporting mechanisms are necessary to assess value for money and build the evidence for change.

The latest FAO report shows that the hidden cost of current food systems is around $12 trillion a year, with the effects borne out through unhealthy diets and disease, environmental pollution, and poverty and undernutrition.

Transforming our food systems would require $500 billion a year, much less than the staggering $670 billion which is now spent yearly to prop up largely harmful agriculture subsidies.

Fixing food systems could provide up to $5 trillion in economic benefits a year, and a tenfold increase in investments each year in agroecological approaches can unleash a cascade of benefits beyond climate mitigation, contributing to biodiversity protection, better health outcomes, and building the long-term resilience for smallholder food producers.

At the national level, food systems must be central to countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) — the national climate plans that are due to be updated in 2025 — with concrete actions to adapt to and mitigate climate change in the agri-food sector.

Countries in East Africa like Kenya and Tanzania are adopting agroecology and streamlining food systems policies into climate plans.

Community leaders from the Global South who are present at COP29 are making a strong case for direct funding to smallholder farmers and fishers, who are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis while contributing the least to it.

Grassroots movements are showing how agriculture can contribute to climate change mitigation as well as adaptation, elevating important links between local solutions and global negotiations.

How we feed the world and climate-proof food systems through increasingly extreme weather events are among the biggest challenges of our times. This is why we urgently need more climate finance to build resilient, equitable, and sustainable food systems.