Are COP29 Food Pledges Going to Succeed? COP28’s Impact Holds Clues

This week, world leaders gather in Baku, Azerbaijan for the 29th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP29. Last year’s global climate conference broke new ground as the first to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from food, with over 100 countries signing a key declaration to deliver change in their food sectors by 2025. Food systems are responsible for a third of global emissions, mostly driven by meat, especially beef. Yet even as a chorus of researchers repeatedly stress the urgency of fixing our broken food systems, only a fraction of the countries who pledged support have made any progress.

Many Countries Still Need to Update Climate Plans, Despite Pledges

At COP28, 160 countries signed on to the UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action. These countries play a significant role — the 160 make up 70 percent of farmers and 80 percent of emissions from agriculture. A key point of the declaration: the countries committed to adding agriculture and food systems into their national climate plans — also known as “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs). In other words, the agreement promised a concrete commitment to reduce food-related emissions.

Yet progress has been slow. Based on estimates, there are roughly just 40 countries on track to have a revised NDC in time for COP30 in Belém, Brazil next year, Edward Davey, a senior advisor for The Food and Land Use Coalition at the World Resources Institute (WRI), tells Sentient. That means 120 countries haven’t done any work to incorporate food into national climate plans so far.

While Davey says he is “very proud” of what was achieved at COP28 — calling it “a privilege to be involved in a supporting role to the UAE government as it brokered the food declaration” — he also expressed concern: “we do very much need to deliver on that declaration,” he wrote to Sentient in a subsequent email, stressing the critical importance of all 160 countries bringing revised NDCs to Brazil.

One country that has signaled they will bring a revised NDC to this year’s COP is the United Kingdom. The UK cannot possibly meet its net zero goals by 2035 and beyond if it doesn’t address diet shifts, Davey says.

And this isn’t just the case for the UK. Researchers at the World Resources Institute have warned that Global North countries cannot meet their international climate commitments without making dietary change — that is, shifting to more plant-forward diets — part of the solution.

For his part, Davey has recommended “forcefully” to the UK Government that its revised national climate plan should include solutions that address the way we farm and the way we eat. Davey cites strategies like better land management, changes to feed, reducing herd sizes, reducing food loss and waste precision breeding, among others. But dietary change — “people of the UK eating less meat per capita” — has to be in the mix too, he says.

There are obvious challenges. Shifting diets and the politics of meat consumption is a contentious subject in the UK, just as it is in the United States. And yet, meat consumption in the Global North plays a massive role in driving global emissions.

There are roughly 20 Global North countries –– including the UK and United States –– that contribute the majority of global agricultural and land use emissions, Davey says. “I think the UAE Declaration will succeed or fail [depending on] whether those 20 or so countries come back to Belém next year with a serious, quantifiable goal of food [and land use] management.”

At COP28, food system pledges also came from businesses and foundations. More than $7 billion was allocated last year from the UAE, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Bezos Earth Fund among others. Jeff Bezos’ foundation committed $57 million into climate food solutions such as reducing methane emissions from livestock. Further, more than 200 non-state actors, including businesses, financial institutions and farmers, signed up to the a UN Call to Action to transform food systems. Large food companies like Nestle and Danone were also signatories.

The United Nations Roadmap Faces Delays and Scrutiny

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced a three-part roadmap for food systems at last year’s conference — aimed at curbing food-related emissions while also addressing global food security concerns. The UN has predicted the world’s population will hit 9.7 billion by the year 2050, so an ongoing global food system challenge is figuring out how to feed nearly 10 billion people without making climate pollution even worse.

The roadmap is supposed to illuminate a path forward — a way for countries to mesh food system change with climate and health goals.

Here too, however, progress has stalled. The full version of the first part of the roadmap has been very delayed and the current “brief” version has also drawn criticism. Experts from the U.S., Brazil and Norway published a comment in Nature earlier this year critiquing the roadmaps various “missed opportunities for greenhouse gas emissions reductions,” among other issues. The guidelines on how to sustainably increase productivity in the Global South, while still protecting the environment, has also been left ambiguous, notes Beatriz Luraschi, a policy analyst at the European Climate Foundation.

Another setback to the roadmap was a letter to the FAO signed by more than 100 academics, calling for a controversial livestock “Pathways” report published at COP28 to be retracted over unclear and inaccurate methods. They called for the release of the roadmap to be “delayed until the FAO has engaged in serious dialogue with experts and civil society in a reflective process to assess what went wrong in the Pathways report,” as​​ well as an overhaul of the FAO’s internal review processes.

That Pathways report seemingly promoted growing the livestock industry while ignoring emissions. The authors of a study mentioned in the report also spoke out separately, saying the FAO report “distorted” their research and underestimated the climate impact of reducing meat consumption.

These criticisms “cast a shadow over the roadmap,” says Davey, who is hopeful for the roadmap’s next installment.

The first two parts of the roadmap — both global and regional “pathways” — are due to be published at COP29. However, so far there has been no formal review or consultations with stakeholders, Luraschi says, so it’s still unclear whether the FAO will address the raised concerns in the new reports.

The Launch of a Dedicated Food Transformation Coalition

Despite the slow movement elsewhere, one coalition has made progress. The Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation (ACF) comprising Norway, Brazil, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Cambodia, was born at last year’s COP to drive change in their country’s prospective food systems. The Alliance is “incredibly powerful [and] one of the best things that happened at COP28,” Davey says.

Supported in part by the Bezos Earth Fund, The Alliance acts across ten key priority areas to transform food systems, including food waste reduction and gender parity advancement. These sweeping focus areas are significant, says Clem Perry, director of partnerships for the Food and Land Use Coalition which acts as part of the ACF’s Secretariat, as each of these individual countries face their own unique challenges. “The production, the consumption, the trade flows, the land use challenges, the nutrition [and] health levels and challenges are very, very different in each [Alliance] country,” Perry tells Sentient.

Members of the Alliance spent this year in regular talks, both by phone and in person every three months, hashing out their biggest challenges and goals. “One of the most difficult trade-offs that we’ve been grappling with are those between improving or enhancing national feed production whilst not negatively impacting nature,” Perry says.

Sierra Leone has set an example of how to do this effectively by cracking down on their excessive rice imports and reforming their own national food system without encroaching on virgin rainforest. With a $100 million investment from the African Development Bank, Sierra Leone has put the infrastructure in place to increase rice production without deforesting. “In less than a year, that felt like a really significant and massive win and is exactly the kind of thing that we’re looking to replicate with other countries,” Perry says.

The hope is that countries can rally together to act as a collective to tackle food systems, Davey says, as we don’t want developed countries to simply offshore the environmental impact of farming to others. “We live in an integrated world. The decisions that one country takes [has] a bearing on another,” he says. It remains to be seen whether this week’s conference in Azerbaijan can correct the course.