Dispatch From UN Climate Change Conference: Monday, Nov. 17

Danielle Nierenberg

Danielle Nierenberg 

Yesterday was a rest day here at the UN Climate Change Conference, and today, discussions and negotiations start up again in full swing for the second and final week of COP30. With the conference already halfway over, we’re looking to see an increased focus over the next week on action—on not just talking about solutions to the climate crisis, but implementing them.

If you're here on the ground, I want to personally invite you to meet directly with UN Climate Negotiators from four countries at Food Tank's special happy hour, at 4:45PM today at the Resilience Pavilion (Blue Zone). Too often, we just hear about these negotiations through official statements and press reports, but I think it's important for Food Tankers to be able to communicate personally with UN Negotiators, national-level cabinet ministers, and other high-level policymakers and leaders. So I look forward to seeing you this afternoon, and please check out our full schedule of dynamic COP30 programming HERE.

Look, it’s no secret that the COP system is imperfect. After all, this is the 30th year that policymakers, stakeholders, and advocates have come together to discuss climate solutions—and while progress has been made over the years, we now need to see much more ambitious action. 

But imagine how successful previous decades’ COP negotiations could have been if food and agriculture systems had always been as front-and-center as they are today! 

If high-level policymakers had taken food seriously from the start, imagine what modern climate challenges we might not be facing. If every public and private sector leader realized the long-term climate solutions that come from food and ag systems 30 years ago, we might not have even needed to gather in Belém this month.

It’s not too late! I’m so pleased to see such robust discussions around food systems here at COP30, because today we know it’s undeniable that food system transformation is one of our most surefire pathways toward meaningful climate action. 

For example, over the weekend, CGIAR announced that more than US$142 million has been pledged by nations at COP30 so far to advance agricultural research and innovation for a climate-resilient future—and they estimate that this work provides a return of US$10 for every US$1 invested. In other words, achieving climate goals through food system transformation is not only common-sense; it’s a financial win-win.

Elsewhere here at COP30, Brazil’s Ministry of Finance and the Green Climate Fund announced a South–South Knowledge Hub as a platform to support technical cooperation and peer learning across regions, as well as new Country Platforms to facilitate international cooperation on climate and nature financing.

This is why I believe that large-scale, high-level conferences like COP are important. Obviously we need to continue to see global leaders to step up, but knowledge-sharing, conversations that break down silos, and building the business case for climate transformation are all valid and vital components of a broader approach to climate action. 

At the Swedish Pavilion on Friday, Food Tank and our partners brought together high-level decision-makers and pioneering companies to highlight scalable solutions across entire value chains, touching on everything from packaging to fertilizers to retail. Later that evening, we co-hosted a vibrant dinner gathering with farmers, policymakers, business leaders, scientists, and cultural voices, to celebrate the flavors and resilience of the Amazon.

Another necessary goal we can achieve through the lens of food systems at large-scale events like COP30 is to ensure that the voices of farmers, food producers, Indigenous land caretakers, and workers cannot be ignored.

“The fact that 55 percent of the landscape in Australia is managed by farmers means that they have a much bigger opportunity than anyone…to restore ecosystems,” Nathaniel Pelle, Business & Nature Campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation, told us during a Summit at the Action on Food Hub, which Food Tank and our partners livestreamed HERE.

Farmers know the close-to-home, immediate, devastating impacts of the climate crisis more intimately than anyone—which also means they have a unique insight into solving these challenges.

“Health is everything,” says Karina Gonçalves David, a Brazilian farmer and agroforestry practitioner and the Co-founder of ProNobis Agroflorestal. “We need to have the health of the soil. We need to have the health of the production. We need to feed people with healthy food. We need to have health relationships.”

When it comes to making the case for how climate change can be addressed agroecologically, I think Fabrício Muriana, the co-founder of Instituto Regenera, said it best: “It’s possible and delicious. It’s possible and nutritious. It’s possible and led by women.”

Hear, hear! 

As I said at the beginning of COP30, “business as usual” is broken—and, if I may be so bold, I think part of the problem is that, for too long, “business as usual” has ignored food systems. From my vantage point, as the global food movement has worked to become more front-and-center at global COP conferences in recent years, food and agriculture systems provide a pathway for COP to be more productive, forward-thinking, and action-oriented.

So as we enter the second and final week of COP30 here in Belém, I hope that everyone—from the high-level policymakers around the negotiating tables to the business and civil society leaders to the advocates and activists on the ground—will commit to using food systems as a tool for meaningful climate action. We know it works, so there are no excuses!

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