FAO brings agrifood systems to the forefront of climate action

Sustainable and resilient agrifood systems are essential for achieving the Paris Agreement targets on climate change while ensuring food security and nutrition for present and future genrations.

This was the overarching message delivered by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil.

During the 10-21 November conference, FAO emphasized that science-based agrifood solutions can play a pivotal role in reducing emissions, enhancing carbon sequestration, restoring ecosystems, and strengthening resilience.

“From restoration of degraded agricultural lands to resilient crops and sustainable aquaculture, and livestock, we have the solutions that deliver across sectors,” FAO Director-General QU Dongyu said ahead of the conference.

The biggest challenge, according to FAO, is finance.

Despite an increase in critical agrifood investments, forestry, livestock, fisheries, and crop production together received just 4 percent of total climate-related development finance.

For a sector that can deliver a third of global emission reductions, this gap is not only unequal – “it is a lost opportunity,” according to Qu, who warned that overlooking agrifood systems means leaving one of the most effective pathways to low-emission growth untapped.

FAO and the COP30 Presidency’s Action Agenda

FAO supported the COP30 Presidency’s Action Agenda to promote agrifood solutions for climate through a number of initiatives. These include:

• RAIZ (Resilient Agriculture Investment for net-Zero land degradation) - A global effort offering a “quadruple win” for climate, biodiversity, food security, and combating desertification where FAO will support implementation through the FAST Partnership.
• TERRA (Together for the Expansion of Resilient and Restorative Agroforestry and Agroecology) focuses on accelerating solutions for family farmers, cooperatives and producer associations, including through finance and technical assistance, with FAO support through the Forest and Farm Facility.
• Bioeconomy Challenge - A global, multi-stakeholder platform to translate bioeconomy principles into measurable actions and scalable solutions by 2028, with FAO supporting the work on metrics and indicators.
• Tropical Forest Forever Facility – A Brazil-led finance instrument providing long-term payments to tropical countries for hectares of standing tropical moist forests – and the Call to Action on Integrated Fire Management and Wildfire Resilience, urging governments to shift from reactive fire suppression to integrated fire management. Both initiatives are supported by FAO including through the Global Fire Management Hub.

FAO’s Science and Knowledge

FAO released several publications showcasing the latest data, new science and analysis of agrifood systems and climate change:

• 2025 report on Climate-related development finance to agrifood systems – Global and regional trends – Part of FAO’s Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation (FAST) Partnership flagship series, the analysis revealed that while overall climate-related development finance grew by 12 percent between 2022 and 2023, finance for agrifood systems stagnated at just one percent.
• Landmark report on National Adaption Plans (NAPs) – Highlighting that most developing countries struggle to address key agrifood risks or protect vulnerable groups due to severe financing and capacity gaps.
• Update on scientific findings on the interactions between agriculture, food systems and climate change – Offers a comprehensive resource authored by leading scientists to help policy makers, researchers, the media and the public base their actions on the best available evidence, while also aiming to support the next assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
• Highlights from the report on Extreme Heat – Underscoring the independent and compound risks posed by extreme heat and presenting pathways to strengthen resilience across agricultural sectors.
• Greenhouse gas emissions from agrifood systems – A FAOSTAT report on global, regional and country trends, covering the 2001-2023 period. The report notes that global agrifood systems emissions reached 16.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023, up 21 percent since 2001. Their share in total emissions fell from 38 to 32 percent in 2023.
• Pathways Towards a Just Transition – FAO actively engaged in discussions to promote equitable access to climate finance, emphasizing social inclusion, locally led approaches, and the reinforcement of social protection systems. These efforts aim to enhance the resilience and adaptive capacity of vulnerable family farmers, small-scale producers, Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

FAO’s involvement in COP

Throughout COP30, FAO worked with countries and partners to place agriculture and food security at the center of negotiations, including discussions on the Global Goal on Adaptation, loss and damage, nationally determined contributions (NDCs), National Adaptation Plans, climate finance, and just transition. The outcomes from COP30 demonstrate that there is still some way to go to fully mainstream agriculture and food system solutions into the negotiation streams.

In contrast, the Presidency’s Action Agenda showed high ambition for climate action through agriculture and food systems. FAO supported the development of the COP Presidency’s Action Agenda, including new initiatives on agriculture, forests, and bioeconomy and will play a central role in their implementation.

The FAST Partnership, hosted by FAO, will continue serving as a COP-to-COP mechanism to keep agrifood systems central to climate dialogues and support post-COP implementation, including for the new RAIZ initiative.

In Brazil, FAO also co-hosted the Food and Agriculture Pavilion for the fourth year in a row with the CGIAR, promoting multistakeholder dialogue within and alongside the negotiations.