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

The Bonn Climate Conference, the mid-year climate negotiations to prepare for the annual Conference of Parties (COPs) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), wrapped up in mid-June this year with progress on negotiations on agriculture.

Fabricio Muriana, co-founder of Instituto Regenera, a civil society organization working on regenerative food systems, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, said this global meeting was an important moment for him to observe how negotiations on agriculture proceeded after the stalemate in discussions at COP28.

Last year, 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 stalled 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 differences remained unresolved among countries and only a weak procedural text was produced at the end of COP28.

The progress in Bonn this year with agreement on a draft text, and 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 talks in Bonn are not as high-profile as the annual year-end climate COPs, they are crucial to advance progress on 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 in our collective effort to tackle worsening climate change we are in a race against time.

Many civil society and frontline community leaders highlight this clear disconnect between the glacial pace of global negotiations and the increasing frequency of climate disasters. Their engagement in these spaces is 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 co-organized a side event on “What Food System Keeps 1.5°C Degrees? Brazil’s Potential to Lead an Agrifood Just Transition ” and he was able to use his time in Bonn to meet with 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 represent the Global South context where the impacts of the climate crisis on food and agriculture are harsh. Communities in the Global South have little recourse to access finance for adaptation and this often exacerbates poverty and debt, 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 progressive language that captures 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, he said.

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.

Another important workshop on the “Means of Implementation”, which refers to finance, technical transfer and capacity building, will be important to ensure there is sufficient funding for developing countries to turn their plans into action. Agreement on a long-term finance goal is expected to be central to COP29 outcomes.

Rosinah Mbenya, country coordinator for PELUM, Participatory Ecological Land Use Management, Kenya, said that despite African negotiators pushing for a coordination group for this workstream, this was not was ultimately agreed to. The issue has now been handed over to the informal sessions to discuss how to take this coordination forward.

“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 on livelihoods,” she added.

Access issues for Global South delegates

Vikman Proscovier, chairperson, Climate Action Network Uganda, said her she was closely following the negotiations between the G77 + China and the EU and USA, which sometimes grew heated in attempts to find consensus on issues.

She also stressed the importance of making the UN climate conferences accessible to delegates from the Global South in terms of visas and logistics. Speaking about her own experience travelling from Uganda to Germany she said, “The German visa controversy did not help matters. Many Global South delegates faced delays in 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