Conclusion
The breakthrough objective for the food and agriculture sector is to make climate-resilient, sustainable agriculture the most attractive and widely adopted option for farmers everywhere by 2030 (IEA 2022). It is well known that the agrifood sector is particularly vulnerable to climate change, with losses and damages occurring throughout the value chain. To minimize the impacts of climate change, it is crucial to stay within the 1.5ยฐC to 2ยฐC temperature goals set by the Paris Agreement. Achieving this requires immediate and deep reductions in emissions across all sectors, including the agrifood sector, which accounts for almost one-third of all GHG emissions (IPCC 2023), within a broader framework of just transitions that safeguards the interests of smallholder producers, particularly those in the global South who are most at risk.
The agriculture chapter of the 2022 Breakthrough Agenda Report identified seven technological areas and approaches to achieve breakthroughs in the agriculture sector. The agriculture chapter of the 2023 Breakthrough Agenda Report provided detailed analysis of these seven technological areas and approaches by documenting the latest scientific advancements in each one and evaluating how these fare across the four principles outlined earlier. This year, we have focused on a subset of the agrifood system, exploring four concrete technologies and approaches for reducing emissions from fertilizers and limiting enteric emissions from livestock. The reason for focusing on a subset of technologies and approaches was to tackle the two most important sources of GHG emissions within the agrifood sector, that is, fertilizers and livestock, and to provide recommendations for international action that are more granular in nature and can be easily translated into high impact international priority action for 2024โ2025.
The recommendations, like those of the previous two years, focus on five sets of actions, namely, finance; knowledge sharing; metrics and standards; support for RD&D; and trade and markets, with specific and detailed recommendations for sub-actions under each of these. Put together, these recommendations, when translated into appropriate high-ambition priority actions in 2024โ2025, will set in motion actions that can potentially contribute to emissions reductions, particularly in high-income countries, and emissions reductions without compromising food and nutrition security, particularly in LMIC contexts. The key to achieving the desired results will depend on the ambition set in the priority actions based on the recommendations of this report. While translating the recommendations to priority actions, it will be important to remember that agriculture and agrifood systems are hugely diverse and none of the recommendations can be applied in a uniform way. Therefore, the focus must be on triggers that incentivize movement toward low-emission food systems, with each country charting its own roadmap based on its own unique national circumstances.
Finally, the report mapped the extensive landscape of existing efforts at international cooperative actions aligned to the four breakthrough goals, and the center stage that agrifood systems are taking within the climate discussions. These show that there is increasing intention to align actions in this sector toward a low-emissions pathway, but also that those actions are falling short of what is needed. More ambitious actions to take food systems to a low-emissions pathway, without compromising the food and nutrition security of the most vulnerable, needs to be at the top of the agenda in the next few years.