Assessment of international cooperation
Since the Breakthrough Agenda was launched in November 2021 at COP26, there has been growing recognition of the need to spotlight the agrifood system in international efforts to mitigate, adapt to, and prevent loss and damage from human-caused climate change. In this section, we provide a non-exhaustive assessment of international cooperation that meets any of the four principles of the Agriculture Breakthrough Agenda since then. Efforts are categorized by different forms of international cooperation, corresponding to the recommendations made in the 2023 Breakthrough Agenda Report (Figure 2).
3.1 International sharing of knowledge on policy and implementation
The Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan – the decision text of COP27, in 2022 – was the first global climate pact agreed at a Conference of the Parties (COP) to formally recognize water, food security, and forests as key issues relating to climate action. “Nature-based solutions” were included in the text for the first time, with forests, oceans, and agriculture each having a dedicated section. The Sharm el-Sheikh Joint work on implementation of climate action on agriculture and food security, a four-year work program was launched to promote a holistic approach to addressing issues related to agriculture and food security through knowledge and information sharing.
Agriculture was the focus of one of the thematic task forces established the following year, in 2023. COP28 saw the launch of the COP28 UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action. Signatories include 160 national governments (including the EU), representing over 5.7 billion people, 70 percent of the food consumed, nearly 500 million farmers, and 76 percent of total emissions from the global food system. These signatories have committed to several actions, including scaling up adaptation and resilience to reduce the vulnerability of all food producers to the impacts of climate change and promoting food security and nutrition by increasing efforts to support vulnerable people. A Technical Cooperation Collaborative (TCC) was launched at SB-60 in Bonn in 2024 to support the implementation of the COP28 UAE Declaration mentioned above. The Call to Action for Transforming Food Systems for People, Nature and Climate and the three-year Agrifood Sharm el-Sheikh Support Programme were also announced at COP28. This latter initiative aims to facilitate dialogue and knowledge sharing among global and regional policymakers and to help countries unlock finance and support for farmers, food producers, small agribusinesses, and local communities.
The COP29 Presidency has announced the launch of 14 initiatives, of which 3 are of relevance for the agrifood sector. These are: HARMONIYA 4 Climate Resilience: Empowering Farmers, Villages, and Rural Communities; Baku Dialogue on Water and Climate: Enhancing Action on Climate Change and Water Nexus; and Clean Hydrogen Initiative. These all involve knowledge sharing and coalition building.
3.2 Development of common metrics and indicators
The Sharm el-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda, endorsed at COP27 in 2022, presented over 30 global adaptation outcome targets urgently needed by 2030 to increase the resilience of 4 billion people. The latest climate meeting at Bonn in June 2024 (SB-60) saw progress in the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, which initiated a two-year UAE–Belém work program aimed at developing indicators to measure advancements toward the targets established by the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) framework. Given the lack of indicators for measuring adaptation and resilience in the agriculture sector, progress in the GGA is much awaited.
Another initiative aimed at developing metrics and indicators is Regen10’s Outcomes-Based Framework, which was launched at COP28. Having developed a zero draft framework to measure and support the transition to regenerative food systems, the organizations involved – Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU), World Farmers’ Organisation (WFO), World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) – are testing this throughout 2024, with the aim of publishing an updated framework by early 2025.
3.3 Finance
As well as introducing the Agriculture Breakthrough Agenda, COP26 oversaw the launch of the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM4C). This aims to address climate change and global hunger by uniting participants to significantly increase investment in, and other support for, climate-smart agriculture and food systems innovation over five years (2021–2025). Most recently, at COP28, the initiative announced an increased investment of more than US$17 billion, up from US$8 billion at COP27. At COP28, the FAO and Egyptian Presidency announced the Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation (FAST) Initiative, which aims to improve access to climate finance at farm and country levels to transform agriculture and food systems by 2030 while supporting food and economic security and the environment. A Climate Investment Fund for Future will be launched at COP29, seeking to increase the private sector’s involvement in financing climate action and transition in the developing world.
International financial institutions and multilateral development banks have also launched many major flagship investment projects in the agrifood sector. The World Bank currently has 416 active or pipeline projects categorized under “Agriculture”1 across the world. The Asian Development Bank has 2,264 projects labelled “Agriculture, natural resources and rural development,” and, as of April 2024, is on schedule to deliver its commitment to invest US$14 billion by 2025 to improve food security and support measures to ease the food crisis in Asia and the Pacific. Meanwhile, the Inter-American Development Bank lists 215 current and 24 pipeline projects relating to agriculture and food security.
Select initiatives aimed at mitigating GHG emissions from agriculture include the World Bank’s Global Methane Reduction Platform for Development (CH4D), which supports investments in methane abatement in agriculture and waste, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)’s Reducing Agricultural Methane Programme (RAMP). This latter program supports countries with the integration of methane reductions into their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and in the design of new agricultural development projects with robust methane mitigation components. Both initiatives were launched at COP28.
The Group of Seven (G7) and Group of 20 (G20) agendas also include important initiatives to direct investment for broader development and environment objectives in the agrifood system. In 2024, G7 leaders launched the Apulia Food Systems Initiative to intensify efforts to overcome structural barriers to food security and nutrition and to build resilient sustainable and productive agriculture and food systems, and to ensure that all people can progressively realize the right to adequate food. The G7 Research Group, which provided a qualitative assessment of how well the G7 goals were achieved at the Apulia Summit in June 2024, gave a score of B- (on a scale that ranks from A+ to F) for food and agriculture. The commitment to accelerate innovation and investment for food safety and sustainable food production only scored a D+ (G7 Research Group 2024).
These figures and lists of initiatives belie a more cautionary tale. Agrifood systems include high-emitting and climate-vulnerable sectors, yet climate finance flowing to them is strikingly low (Climate Policy Initiative 2023). In 2019–20, agrifood systems received just 4.3 percent of total global climate finance tracked at the project level, with an annual average of US$28.5 billion (Climate Policy Initiative 2023). The amount of climate finance flowing to agrifood systems is also on a downward trajectory as a proportion of global climate finance flows (Galbiati et al. 2023). Climate finance toward adaptation more broadly is also on a downward trend, something the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) claims is “a cause for alarm” and a “missed opportunity” (Galbiati et al. 2023).
Over the period 2020–22, support to the agricultural sector in the 54 countries covered by the 2023 OECD Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation Report totaled US$851 billion per year. Only 12.5 percent, or US$106 billion of this, went to investments in agricultural innovation, infrastructure, and other public goods. Despite international calls for environmentally harmful support to be eliminated or reformed, efforts to reform support in agriculture over the past decade have largely stalled.
3.4 Research, development, and demonstration (RD&D)
Spending on RD&D has huge returns on investment, with a study by the USDA Economic Research Service finding that spending on public agricultural R&D from 1900 to 2011 generated, on average, $20 in benefits to the US economy for every $1 of spending, while another study found that adoption of CGIAR’s innovations in developing countries raised economic welfare by US$47 million every year between 1961 and 2000. Despite well-documented benefits, public spending on agricultural R&D and innovation has been slowing in OECD countries. Public expenditure on innovation has declined relative to the sector’s size, from 0.9 percent of the value of agricultural production in 2000–02 to less than 0.6 percent in 2020–22 (OECD, 2022).
3.5 Trade
In 2022, the European Commission stated that “A global mineral fertilizer crisis, of severity unseen since the 1970s, is currently unfolding,” due to supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the energy crisis, and war in Ukraine (European Commission 2022). Since then, fertilizer prices have fallen from those initial highs and new trade routes and patterns have emerged (Hebebrand and Glauber 2024).
In June 2023, Spanish multinational electric utility company Iberdrola and the world’s largest seaborne trader of anhydrous ammonia, Trammo, signed the largest green ammonia framework agreement in Europe for the purchase and sale of up to 100,000 tons of green ammonia per year from 2026. In March 2024, the Norwegian crop nutrition company Yara and GHC SAOC, a wholly owned subsidiary of renewable energy company Acme Cleantech, signed a binding agreement for supply of ammonia with reduced CO2 emissions from Acme to Yara on a long-term basis.
As a derivative commodity of green hydrogen, the trade dynamics of green ammonia can be linked to those of the nascent green hydrogen industry. As the production of hydrogen produced via renewable energy increases, so too will the trade possibilities for green ammonia. Modeling from a 2022 analysis revealed that, in a world that has fully decarbonized by 2050, about a quarter of the total global hydrogen demand in a 1.5°C scenario could be satisfied through international trade (IRENA 2022). Of the traded hydrogen, 55 percent would flow through pipelines, while 45 percent would be shipped, predominantly as ammonia.
While there are early signs of growth in the global trade of green ammonia, and while the expected demand in clean shipping fuels is predicted to propel this further, green ammonia has not yet reached cost parity with other forms of ammonia (discussed in section 6.3).
Figure 2 maps all these initiatives across the four breakthrough principles and shows that the majority of the initiatives map across multiple criteria. Annex 1 lists relevant initiatives across the agrifood system, based on which Figure 2 was drawn.
1 N.B. Some of these are multicountry, while some are at the national or local level.