Frontline leaders from Latin America and Africa share highlights from their engagement at the UN climate conference in Germany.

The Bonn Climate Conference, the mid-year climate negotiations to prepare for the annual Conference of Parties (COPs) under the UN Climate Change framework, wrapped up in June this year with important progress on food and agriculture.

For Fabricio Muriana, co-founder of Instituto Regenera, a civil society organization working on regenerative food systems, based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this global meeting was an important moment to see negotiations on agriculture picking up following the stalemate in discussions at COP28.

In 2023, COP28 put food systems transformation on the political and climate agenda with a declaration signed by 159 countries who stated a commitment to include food and agriculture in their nationally determined contributions (NDCs). While this was welcome, progress was halted on the only formal negotiation track for climate and agriculture—the ‘Sharm el-Sheikh Joint Work on Implementation of Climate Action on Agriculture and Food Security’. This joint work programme was adopted in 2022 at COP27 in Egypt but progress had remained slow with differences remaining unresolved between different country blocs with only a weak procedural text at the end of COP28.

The progress in Bonn this year with agreement on a draft text on this negotiation track, with clear topics and a timeline for workshops, was therefore welcome. This work will lead towards a synthesis report that will capture all the progress made under this workstream of agriculture and climate from 2013 to 2025.

While the mid-year climate negotiations are not as high-profile as the annual year-end climate COPs, they are crucial to advance discussions and stake out positions on key issues such as climate finance, Just Transition, adaptation, and mitigation. Approval of any formal text at UN climate meetings requires consensus among all 190+ countries and this takes time. But to avert the worst impacts of climate change, we are in a race against time.

Many civil society and frontline community leaders highlight the clear disconnect between the glacial pace of global fora negotiations and the real world impacts of intensifying climate disasters. Their engagement in these spaces is therefore crucial to represent communities facing droughts, heatwaves, cyclones, and floods and to bring the urgency for action to the attention of decision-makers and government leaders. Muriana for instance co-organized a side event: “What Food System Keeps 1.5°C Degrees? Brazil’s Potential to Lead an Agrifood Just Transition,” and was able to use his time in Bonn to meet Brazilian negotiators working on food and agriculture, a crucial opportunity given that COP30 in 2025 will be held in Brazil.

Geopolitics and power

“The Bonn Climate Conference is not just about technicalities but about geopolitics and power. We see how different countries take positions based on their interests. For many developing countries and civil society leaders from the Global South this is an important fora to raise our concerns. Food systems need to be higher on the priorities for climate action,” said Sena Alouka, food sovereignty activist from Togo and Chair of the Climate Change Working Group of the AFSA, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.

The perspectives from the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), the African Group of Negotiators and the G77+ China is particularly important. They represent the Global South context where the impacts of climate change on agriculture, a source of livelihood and sustenance for tens of millions of people, are harsh with little recourse to access finance for adaptation, and often exacerbating poverty and debt in these regions, he added.

For Alouka what was particularly welcome in this round of negotiations was the agreement to have the first workshop in June 2025 on “Systemic and Holistic Approaches to Implementation of Climate Action on Agriculture, Food Systems and Food Security, Understanding, Cooperation, and Integration into Plans.”

A holistic approach to food systems

The word holistic in particular is more progressive language to capture the full spectrum of the interaction of food systems and climate change without just offering solutions that rely on narrow technocratic or market-based approaches.

It would be good to include an explicit focus on scaling out agroecological approaches in these workshops, both Muriana and Alouka emphasized, and they hope to continue to advocate for this strongly.

Another important workshop on the “Means of Implementation” which broadly refers to finance, technical transfer and capacity building is critical to ensure there is sufficient funding for developing countries to turn plans into action, particularly as a long term finance goal is expected to be the topic of discussion at COP29.

Rosinah Mbenya, country coordinator for PELUM, Participatory Ecological Land Use Management, Kenya, said the only outstanding issue is that despite Africa pushing for a coordination group, this was not agreed. It has been handed over to the informal sessions to discuss coordination.

“I was also interested in the gender text which seems to have had some challenges for finalization including legal challenges. I am also a keen follower of discussions on protein diversification. There is a need to support livestock transition in Africa as this is a major source of livelihood and we cannot just condemn livestock without proper alternatives of livelihoods,” she added.

Access issues for Global South delegates

Vikman Proscovier, chairperson, Climate Action Network Uganda, said her highlight was observing the negotiations between the G77 + China and the EU and USA, which sometimes grew heated while finding consensus on issues.

Speaking from her own experience, she stressed the importance of making the UN climate conferences accessible to delegates from the Global South in terms of visas and logistics. “The German visa controversy did not help matters. Many Global South delegates faced delayed visa processing and some delegates were denied entry, which made headlines in Bonn. Some countries had to halt the negotiations until their teams were in the room. This should never happen again,” she said.

Image credit: UNclimatechange via Flickr, license: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0