Dispatch From UN Climate Change Conference: Thursday, Nov. 20

Danielle Nierenberg

Danielle Nierenberg

When you're a kid, books have pretty straightforward messages: Care for other people. Do the right thing, even if it’s unpopular. Take responsibility for your actions. Keep your promises.

Those takeaways are universal. Or at least I thought they were—but maybe we could use a reminder here at COP30.

If global leaders simply kept the promises they’ve already made on topics like renewable energy and emissions, for example, we could massively reduce the severity of climate change that we’re facing, according to new analysis from the Climate Action Tracker coalition.

If governments followed through on 2035 targets they’ve already negotiated and agreed upon, says Bill Hare, Founder and CEO of Climate Analytics, “it would be a gamechanger, quickly slowing the rate of warming in the next decade and lowering global warming this century from 2.6C to about 1.7C.”

What I’m saying is this: To address the climate crisis, we already know what works. Now it’s time for government leaders to take responsibility and actually follow through on implementation.  

This is especially true when it comes to food and agriculture. When it comes to using food systems to drive climate action, we have a huge stable of evidence-backed solutions right at our fingertips. At COP30 in Belém, yesterday and today are both dedicated to themes of agriculture, food systems and food security, fisheries, and family farming—and so far, we’ve seen some countries step up!

Global policymakers and agriculture leaders launched the Farmers’ Initiative for Resilient and Sustainable Transformations (FIRST), a South-South platform that aims to connect countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia to facilitate solution-sharing around food security, emissions, and resilience. The initiative was launched alongside the Belém Declaration on Fertilizers, a call-to-action spearheaded by Brazil and the United Kingdom to elevate nutrient management and sustainable fertilizers as a strategic priority in climate discussions.

Also yesterday at COP30, nine countries announced support for a new finance accelerator called Resilient Agriculture Investment for net-Zero land degradation (RAIZ), a project led by Brazil to help governments unlock funds to scale up farmland restoration.

These are high-level steps, but they matter. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, reversing just 10 percent of cropland degradation could restore 44 million tonnes of annual food production—which would help nourish 154 million people. So imagine how impactful this project could be with public and private investment to scale it up globally!

I want to take a moment to highlight the Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation, a small but mighty coalition of countries that recognize how central food system transformation is to making meaningful climate progress. The Alliance is co-chaired by Brazil, Norway and Sierra Leone, alongside founding members Cambodia and Rwanda, and yesterday announced Colombia, Vietnam and Italy as new members.

“(The Alliance) stands at the heart of what COP30 must achieve: turning ambition into action and food systems into climate solutions,” COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago said.

Doing the right thing isn’t always popular. Keeping the promises we make isn’t always easy. Taking responsibility for our actions—admitting where we went wrong and stepping up to get back on the right path—isn’t always within our comfort zone.

If these messages feel simplistic, like morals in books we might read our children at bedtime, it’s because they are! But these lessons still apply when our children grow up to be COP30 negotiators, or community leaders or local policymakers or farmers or researchers or parents and caretakers themselves. And here in Belém, these lessons might just help save the world.

(Danielle Nierenberg is the President of Food Tank and can be reached at danielle@foodtank.com)