FAO launches Action Plan for ambitious climate strategy
Jul 22, 2023
New York [US], July 22 (ANI/WAM): The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) has launched an Action Plan designed to support the implementation of its ambitious Strategy on Climate Change 2022-2031.
The Strategy, which was endorsed in June 2022 by FAO’s executive body, the Council, envisages agrifood systems as sustainable, inclusive, resilient and adaptive to climate change.
Global agrifood systems, which encompass the production of food and non-food agricultural products, as well as their storage, transportation, processing, distribution, marketing, disposal and consumption, are currently responsible for about a third of total greenhouse gas emissions. They are also one of the major victims of the climate crisis. But agrifood systems also offer many solutions for confronting the climate crisis, from building resilience and adaptation to mitigation and sequestration.
The Strategy aims to scale up the visibility, uptake and investment in these solution by contributing to adaptive, resilient low-emission economies “while providing sufficient, safe and nutritious foods for healthy diets, as well as other agricultural products and services, for present and future generations, leaving no one behind.
Crucially, it recognizes that the time to act is now.
To guarantee the successful and timely implementation of the Strategy, FAO has developed an Action Plan based on discussions with its FAO Members, so as to ensure that it reflects their needs and priorities as closely as possible.
“FAO’s Strategy on Climate Change is our response to the worldwide challenge of tackling the impacts of the climate crisis, while aiming to address a broad range of interlinked challenges, including biodiversity loss, desertification, land and environmental degradation, the need for accessible, affordable renewable energy, and food and water security,” said FAO Director-General QU Dongyu. “This Action Plan will help implement agrifood system solutions to climate change from across all FAO areas of work, ensuring we are working as one FAO.”
The Action Plan is based on three pillars: 1) advocacy at global and regional levels; 2) policy support at the country level; 3) the scaling-up of climate action on the ground with local actors and vulnerable population. (ANI/WAM)
