Climate Finance Is Failing Farmers Punished by Global Warming
Filipino farmer Esther Penunia has seen her home country ravaged by heat, floods and typhoons just this past year. She saw farmlands in water up to her chest and crops destroyed.
“Climate change is real,” she said from the United Nations COP29 talks in Baku, Azerbaijan. “It’s affecting our crops, our yields and therefore our incomes. Everyone is really getting hurt.”
Penunia, who heads the Asian Farmers Association, has once again made her way to a COP summit to push for greater and better access to finance for small-scale farmers she’s representing — so they can cope with and adapt to the erratic weather.
Small family farmers grow more than a third of the world’s food and up to 80% in regions like Asia and Africa. Yet just 14% of the $9.1 billion in international public climate finance for agriculture and land use was targeted at activities most relevant to them, according to an analysis by Climate Focus. That picture becomes even more distorted when you consider that less than 3% of all public climate finance goes into food systems, even though they make up about a third of the global greenhouse gas emissions.
“The dollars aren’t big enough; the dollars aren’t catalytic enough,” said Sara Farley, vice president of the global food portfolio at the Rockefeller Foundation. “Food is not an elected add-on for climate, future proofing our planet. It is a requisite.”
After last year’s COP28 summit in Dubai was seen as finally putting food on the menu of climate talks, Baku’s focus is more subdued. The organizers came under fire over the dearth of meatless options and some beef and chicken sandwiches labeled with what appeared to be a vegetarian symbol.
On the Food, Agriculture and Water Day on Tuesday, countries are expected to make a pledge to include targets for cutting methane from organic waste, including food. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is soon set to issue a second installment of a food roadmap to net zero. The COP29 presidency’s initiatives and outcomes have outlined a so-called Harmoniya Climate Initiative for Farmers to drive finance and collaboration on agriculture. COP presidencies have announced similar plans in the past and, according to Dhanush Dinesh, who’s watched 17 COPs, they make little difference.
“Instead of spending diplomatic efforts each year creating a new initiative which makes everyone look good, the focus needs to shift to getting money, technology and capacity to farmers,” said Dinesh, the founder of Clim-Eat, which works on food solutions. “Ultimately emissions from food systems are not decreasing and the resilience of farmers at the frontline is also not improving.”
Many eyes are already on next year’s COP host Brazil. As an agricultural powerhouse and home to the Amazon, the world’s largest land carbon sink, it’s widely expected to address key aspects of food systems and the bioeconomy — from methane in livestock to nitrogen from fertilizers, and deforestation.
“We’re expecting a very kind of multidimensional COP that really embraces not only food, but the multiple dimensions of food from deforestation, land conversion, the social dimensions,” Farley said.
While Farley decided to skip Baku this year, she’s already pre-planning her trip to COP30 in Belém, which she thinks will be too important to miss.
