COP29, which took place in Baku, Azerbaijan this year, continued the newfound focus on food of last year’s COP28 in Dubai. The event included a day (19 November) focused on food, agriculture and water, and brought together key organisations through the Action on Food Hub.
But how much did this focus actually translate into significant, lasting action? What did COP29 achieve?
What were the successes of COP29?
The negotiations part of the summit, involving representatives of countries, did not focus on individual sectors such as food.
Food was the subject of just one significant development drawn from these negotiations – progress on the creation of a template for the Sharm El Sheikh Joint Work on implementation of climate action on agriculture and food security (SJWA), an online portal where parties and observers could submit their details for future initiatives.
Specifically, the portal focused on allowing the sharing of information on projects, policies and initiatives that would focus on the issues of agriculture and food security.
“COP29 facilitated increased visibility for the initiative, prompting greater engagement from stakeholders and emphasizing a shift towards implementing the framework,” a Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) spokesperson told FoodNavigator.
“This included translating plans into concrete actions on the ground, such as promoting climate-resilient practices, improving water management, and enhancing early warning systems for farmers.”
Discussions also took place about integrating it with the Loss and Damage fund, “to address climate impacts on agriculture in vulnerable countries.”
Also read → Last year’s event, which took place in Dubai, UAE, was considered a watershed moment for food.
Elsewhere in the conference, the Declaration on Reducing Methane from Organic Waste was endorsed by more than 30 countries, including seven the 10 largest methane emitters, on the Food, Agriculture and Water day. According to the FAO, these signatories accounted for 47% of global methane emissions.
It focused on methane reduction not only in the area of fossil energy and waste, but in agriculture as well. It also acknowledged the contribution of food waste to methane emissions.
“The declaration will address methane’s involvement in food and agriculture because about one-third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted between processing, storage, transportation, distribution and consumption,” said the FAO spokesperson.
Specifically, the declaration was a commitment to include methane reduction within future Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), aligned with 1.5⁰C targets. In the end, ‘up to’ 25 countries have included food waste and loss in their NDC’s.
“The fact that this is now included in nationally determined contributions is huge, because in the past there’s been no mention of food outside of really basic understanding of agriculture being the cause and casualty of climate change,” Lucy Wallace, director of global relationships at EIT Food, told FoodNavigator.
However, as a ‘declaration,’ this is not legally binding but a form of voluntary commitment. This means that there is nothing in place to ensure that the parties involved stick to these commitments.
As COP29 was a ‘finance COP’, the declaration also included ‘stepping up finance’ around the issue of methane.
On the ground, the Action on Food hub brought different stakeholders together to discuss food and climate change, from organisations such as ProVeg and EIT Food to corporates such as Tetra Pak to even some key political figures, such as Mohamed Muizzu, President of the Maldives.
“It was not only a space to organise events, but it was also a space where different groups and organisations met to like discuss priorities [and] coordinate together,” Juliette Tronchon, head of UN affairs for ProVeg International, told FoodNavigator.
Different kinds of stakeholders were brought together, she told us, for example people from the energy sector and the food sector to discuss methane.
What could COP29 have focused on more?
However, many suggest that the summit did not fulfil its full potential.
In the negotiations, for example, other than the aforementioned Sharm el-Sheikh online portal, little was achieved in relation to food or agriculture, according to ProVeg’s Tronchon.
In a broader sense, she told us, not enough finance had been allocated overall at the ‘finance COP’.
“The funds that they are allocating to climate change are not enough to tackle the climate crisis,” she told us.
For example, negotiators have been criticised for not allocating enough in climate finance to developing countries. The need for climate finance for the developing world is suggested to be around $1.3 trillion (€1.23tn) per year.
However, negotiators committed to scaling up only to $300 billion (€285bn) per year by 2035, although they will “secure efforts of all actors” to reach the $1.3tn figure.
Despite progress made at the summit, EIT’s Wallace acknowledged, “we are not doing enough and and I think we all recognize that we’re not doing enough.”
