Ongoing discussions on agriculture within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will culminate this year at the COP22 climate negotiations in Marrakech, following a long process since their initiation in Durban in 2011. The talks in Marrakech follow the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015 which, in its preamble, explicitly refers to safeguarding food security. Also, the vast majority of countries’ Intended Nationally Determined Contributions submissions (i.e. climate pledges) prioritise agriculture as a sector for adaptation and mitigation action.

The agricultural sector is particularly vulnerable to climate change; a small increase of 1 degree Celsius can have significant negative impacts on crop yields, especially in the tropics. Global economic losses in production of three major crops (wheat, maize, and barley) attributed to climate change in the recent past are estimated at approximately US$5 billion per year.

In this paper, land change scenarios are modelled that include biodiversity protection or afforestation for carbon sequestration as an explicit demand which competes with demand for food and feed production.

On June 12th, prior to the annual EAT Forum in Stockholm, the establishment of the new EAT-Lancet Commission was announced jointly by the Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre Johan Rockström, Chair of the EAT Foundation Gunhild Stordalen, and editor of The Lancet Richard Horton.

This paper aims to present a simple way of rating relationships between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) targets to highlight priorities for integrated policy. It presents a conceptual framework to analyse SDG interactions, organize evidence and support decision-making about national priorities.

In this paper, researchers from a range of research institutions investigate the likely ‘transformational adaptations’ that will be necessary over the next century to maintain agricultural yields in sub-Saharan Africa.

This report by the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) represents a consensus of more than 30 authors from 19 institutions across four countries. The report brings together modelling and forecasting research on climate change to the year 2100, and explores how these changes will affect food and agricultural systems worldwide, and in particular in the US.

The second SoW-AnGR by the FAO reviews the developments that have been made in the area of using, developing and safeguarding the genetic resources (i.e. the diversity of breeds) of our mammalian and avian livestock since the first SoW-AnGR report was released in 2007.

This article by the CGIAR’s Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) programme, discusses a new paper that evaluates the impact of investments in agricultural research capacity and research and development (R&D) on adaptation and mitigation.  It argues that when it comes to improving the resilience of crops to climate change, local innovation needs to go hand in hand with more external funding aimed at improving agricultural research capacity.