November 03, 2025

Agriculture Can't Be Left Behind in Climate Action: What COP30 Must Deliver

topic:	Sustainable Agriculture
tags:	#COP30, #desertification, #food security
located:	Cameroon, Senegal
by:	Michelle Brown

When flooding destroyed Ousmane Souina's home in northern Cameroon this year, he found himself without shelter, without funds to buy medicine for his children and without hope. His story might seem like a local tragedy, but it's a preview of a global catastrophe unfolding in slow motion.

As world leaders prepare for COP30 in Belém, Brazil this November, they'll face an uncomfortable truth: the planet has already crossed the 1.5°C threshold. This is the guardrail scientists warned us not to breach, the temperature limit beyond which climate impacts become dramatically more severe and irreversible tipping points loom larger. 

The consequences aren't theoretical anymore. In 2024 alone, extreme weather drove food crises in 18 countries. Drought devastated the Horn and Southern Africa. Below-average rainfall sparked heatwaves and failed harvests around the globe, even as flooding submerged communities across the Sahel and South Sudan, compromising sanitation and hygiene systems.  The interconnected impacts create a perfect storm for malnutrition.

Yet here's the paradox that should haunt every negotiator walking into COP30: While 3.8 billion people live in households dependent on agriculture and food systems for their livelihoods, these sectors remain largely absent from Just Transition negotiations – the very framework meant to ensure climate action doesn't leave vulnerable communities behind.

Brazil's COP presidency offers a rare alignment of crisis and opportunity. For the first time, "Transforming Agriculture and Food Systems" stands as a central pillar of the summit's agenda. The timing matters. As humanitarian funding faces drastic cuts from donor governments, communities like Ousmane's are bearing the brunt of a crisis they didn't cause. For them, the climate emergency and hunger emergency are essentially the same.

What happened next in Ousmane's story reveals what's possible when we do better. Through a combination of cash transfers and support for income-generating activities, he received three months of assistance to establish a tomato business. Today, he earns enough to feed his family and afford basic healthcare. "This project gave me a glimmer of hope," he said. The intervention didn't just address immediate hunger; it rebuilt his capacity to withstand future shocks.

This is what Just Transition looks like on the ground: not abstract policy language, but concrete support that enables people to adapt while maintaining their dignity and agency. 

In eastern Cameroon, farmer field schools are teaching 1,200 people agro-ecological techniques: organic farming practices that reduce costs, improve yields and build resilience simultaneously. In northern Senegal, communities are using holistic rangeland management to reverse desertification, with treated soils now retaining 60 per cent more rainfall and forage species returning after a decade of absence.

In Zambia, where roughly 80 per cent of drought-starved corn crops failed, we reintroduced a heritage food: cow peas. It is a cash crop with long taproots to withstand drought and the ability to improve soil quality by infusing it with nitrogen. The comparatively successful harvest not only fortified diets with plant-based protein, but also dramatically increased incomes. 

These programmes are climate adaptation in action, and they work because they're built on local knowledge and led by affected communities themselves. Yet they're operating at a fraction of the scale needed, hamstrung by a climate finance system that fails the most vulnerable.

Fragile and conflict-affected states currently receive only half the climate finance they need, blocked by bureaucratic barriers that prevent money from reaching frontline communities. Even when funding does arrive, it's often disbursed without adequate attention to local conflict dynamics, sometimes inadvertently worsening tensions over resources.

Money remains a very real barrier. The Zambia project, which started as a pilot project two years ago now has 8,000 farmers on a waiting list. The only barrier is funding. There are other challenges, too. To overcome them, COP30 must deliver three concrete outcomes:

Agriculture and food systems must be formally integrated into Just Transition negotiations

This means clear pathways for the billions of people whose livelihoods depend on farming. Public finance must be directed towards agro-ecological and climate-resilient approaches rather than industrial agriculture, which drives far greater emissions. Smallholder farmers need better market connections to ensure income stability and create more resilient food systems.

Negotiations on the Global Goal on Adaptation, the Paris Agreement framework for building climate resilience, must conclude with specific indicators for agriculture and guaranteed means of implementation. 

The amount and accessibility of climate finance for fragile contexts must be increased 

This includes lowering bureaucratic barriers by streamlining application processes and reducing the administrative burden that often prevents communities in crisis from accessing funds.

It also means ensuring conflict-sensitive approaches that don't inadvertently fuel existing tensions. For example, poorly designed resource distribution can exacerbate local power imbalances or intensify competition over scarce resources.

Water and sanitation infrastructure must be recognized as part of climate adaptation

As water becomes more scarce, the impacts to agriculture further threaten livelihoods and are already driving people from their homes. Water is essential to adapting, and every dollar invested in basic drinking water returns USD 4.30 in economic benefits. Yet, 93.4 per cent of WASH funding needs in crisis contexts remain unmet.

In 2024, 176.6 million people required humanitarian WASH assistance, but only 48 million received it. Eighty percent of diseases in crisis contexts link to unsafe water and inadequate sanitation – directly exacerbating malnutrition.

There's one more imperative that we must address in Belem: COP30 should prioritise sustained humanitarian funding to counter rising food insecurity and malnutrition in climate-affected communities.

As climate shocks continue driving hunger crises, donor governments are cutting the very budgets needed to respond. Governments should support anticipatory action – interventions that prevent crises before they escalate, saving both money and lives – and invest in approaches like the humanitarian-development-peace nexus that reduce humanitarian need while building long-term resilience.

Ousmane's transformation – from displacement to dignity, from despair to entrepreneurship – cost relatively little but changed everything. Scale that intervention across millions of farming families, and you're looking at both climate adaptation and hunger prevention. The question isn't whether we know what works: It's whether the powerful parties gathering in Belém will finally prioritise the food on our plates and the farmers who grow it.

For communities like Ousmane's, the climate crisis isn't coming; it's already here.

Michelle Brown is Associate Director of Advocacy, Action Against Hunger.

Image by Richard Nyoni.