As COP27 Comes to a Close, Agriculture Initiatives Are Top Priority
Representatives have spent the past two weeks focused on how to mitigate the effects of climate change. Three of the big initiatives focus on agriculture and food production.
The governments of 42 nations have pledged $8 billion to help farmers reduce emissions and adapt to climate change, doubling their original financial investment from last year. That’s just one of the promises to come out of COP27, or the annual Conference of the Parties summit of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
This year’s climate talks, which took place in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, and hosted representatives from 200 countries, included plans and initiatives with a focus on the agricultural industry. The ag-based plans aim to reduce the sector’s impact on greenhouse gas emissions, as well as assist farmers with the challenges of growing and raising food in the face of changing climates.
The $8-billion initiative, called Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate, originally launched a year ago with a mission of bolstering agricultural technology—including artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and robotics—to address the increasingly pressing impacts of climate change. In the face of increased product losses, extreme weather events and less-than-fruitful harvests, along with sky-high input costs, the initiative invested even more money this year to address the issues as quickly as possible. A chunk of the funds—$1 billion—will be allocated to small-holder farmers in developing regions and advancing their access to technology. But some advocacy groups, including the International Coalition on Climate and Agriculture (ICCA), say the pledge is merely a distraction. “Agritech and the industrial agribusiness model it furthers are not a solution to the climate crisis, but rather a significant part of the problem,” said Andrew Kimbrell, ICCA co-founder, in a news release.
Another commitment to come out of the conference looks at deforestation as a result of the food industry. A group of 14 major agricultural commodity companies—aiming to end deforestation as a result of production of products such as palm oil, beef, cacao and soy by 2025— announced a plan on how to reduce the amount of trees cleared over the next few years. As trees act as a carbon-sequestering system, clearing growth from large swaths of land to repurpose for uses such as grazing cattle can result in high emissions of greenhouse gasses, with no carbon sink nearby.
The companies, including big names in the industry such as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and JBS, say they will start the process of eliminating deforestation for certain commodities and report their progress transparently along the way. However, critics of the plan, including environmental groups, argue that the language of the proposal allows for too many loopholes, resulting in a not-strict-enough policy that won’t address the problems quickly. One worry is the phase-out over years is too slow, allowing for a time period of production and profit to rise before the deadline.
In another effort to lower the greenhouse gas emissions involved with food production—the industry accounts for around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions—the U.N food agency announced at the conference that it will launch a plan within the next year to make the world’s food system more sustainable. The forthcoming plan is said to address just how farming and the food industry can fall in line to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. According to Reuters, the group of more than 40 investors collectively manages roughly $18 trillion.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].As COP27 Comes to a Close, Agriculture Initiatives Are Top Priority
by Shea Swenson, Modern Farmer
November 18, 2022
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
Few experts in population biology, related fields of science, demography and economics appear ready and willing to see what is in front of naked eyes. Too many experts have confused cause and effect and thereby vitiated the coherence of mind and clarity of vision required to sensibly interpret evidence of whatsoever could be objectively correlated with reality. As a consequence, they appear to find the ecological science of human population dynamics simultaneously unbelievable yet virtualy irrefutable. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226928770_Human_Population_Numbers_as_a_Function_of_Food_Supply, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227269417_Human_Carrying_Capacity_Is_Determined_by_Food_Availability.) We do not have a food production problem. Food harvests are abundant; food is sufficient to feed the human community plus many… Read more »