For the first time, food and agriculture were central during the annual United Nations climate conference in 2023.
More than 130 countries signed a declaration on December 1 pledging to make their food systems – everything from production to consumption – central to national strategies to tackle climate change.
The declaration contains few concrete actions to adapt to climate change and reduce emissions, but it does draw attention to a crucial issue.
The global food supply is increasingly confronted with disruptions due to extreme heat and storms. It is also a major contributor to climate change and is responsible for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. This tension is the reason that agricultural innovation is increasingly being discussed in international climate discussions.
Today, agriculture provides enough food for the world’s eight billion people, even though many do not have adequate access to it. But to feed a world population of 10 billion people by 2050, agricultural lands would need to expand by 660,000 to 1.2 million square miles (171 million to 301 million hectares) compared to 2010. That would lead to more deforestation, contributing to climate change. In addition, some practices that are widely used to produce sufficient food, such as the use of synthetic fertilizers, also contribute to climate change.
Simply eliminating deforestation and these practices without alternative solutions would reduce the world’s food supply and farmers’ incomes. Fortunately, innovations are emerging that can help.
In a new report, the Innovation Commission for Climate Change, Food Security and Agriculture, founded by Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Kremer, identifies seven priority areas for innovation that can help ensure adequate food production, minimize greenhouse gas emissions and scale to hundreds of millions people.
I am an agricultural economist and the executive director of the commission. Three innovations stand out in particular for their ability to scale quickly and be economically viable.
Accurate, accessible weather forecasts
As crops become increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather and farmers struggle to adapt, accurate weather forecasts are crucial. Farmers need to know what to expect, both in the coming days and in the future, to make strategic decisions about planting, irrigating, fertilizing and harvesting.
Yet access to accurate, detailed forecasts for farmers is rare in many low- and middle-income countries.
Our assessment shows that investing in technology to collect data and make forecasts widely available – for example via radio, SMS or WhatsApp – can pay off many times over for the economy.
For example, accurate state-level forecasts of seasonal monsoon rainfall could help Indian farmers optimize sowing and planting times, yielding an estimated $3 billion in benefits over five years – at a cost of about $5 million.
If farmers in Benin received accurate forecasts by text message, we estimate they could save each farmer $110 to $356 per year, a large amount in that country.
More information sharing between neighboring countries, using platforms such as the World Meteorological Organization’s Climate Services Information System, could also improve forecasts.
Microbial fertilizers
Another innovation priority concerns the expansion of the use of microbial fertilizers.
Nitrogen fertilizers are widely used to increase crop yields, but are typically made from natural gas and are a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Microbial fertilizers use bacteria to help plants and soil absorb the nutrients they need, reducing the amount of nitrogen fertilizer needed.
Research has shown that microbial fertilizers can increase legume yields in healthy soil by 10% to 30% and provide billions of dollars in benefits. Other microbial fertilizers work with corn, and scientists are working on more improvements.
Soybean farmers in Brazil have been using a rhizobia-based microbial fertilizer for decades to improve their yields and reduce the cost of synthetic fertilizers. But this technique is not so widely known elsewhere. Scaling up will require funding to expand testing to more countries, but it has major potential benefits for farmers, soil health and the climate.
Reducing methane from livestock
A third innovation priority is livestock farming, which is responsible for roughly two-thirds of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. With beef demand expected to rise 80% by 2050 as low- and middle-income countries become richer, reducing those emissions is essential.
Several innovative methods to reduce methane emissions from livestock focus on intestinal fermentation, which leads to methane belching.
Adding algae, seaweed, lipids, tannins or certain synthetic compounds to livestock feed can alter the chemical reactions that generate methane during digestion. Research has shown that some techniques have the potential to reduce methane emissions by a quarter to almost 100 percent. When cattle produce less methane, they also waste less energy, which can be spent on growth and milk production, which can provide a boost to farmers.
The method is still expensive, but further development and private investment could help scale up the method and reduce costs.
Gene editing, both in livestock and the microorganisms in their stomachs, could also one day hold potential.
Scaling up agricultural innovation
The Innovation Committee has also identified four other priorities for innovation:
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Helping farmers and communities implement better rainwater harvesting.
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Reducing the costs of digital farming, allowing farmers to use irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides as efficiently as possible.
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Stimulating the production of alternative proteins to reduce the demand for livestock.
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Providing insurance and other social protections to help farmers recover from extreme weather events.
While promising agricultural innovations exist, commercial incentives to develop and scale them up have been insufficient, leading to underinvestment, especially in low- and middle-income countries.
However, innovation financing has a reputation for generating very high social returns. This creates an opportunity for public and philanthropic investment in developing and deploying innovations on a scale that reaches hundreds of millions of people. To be effective, any potential innovation must of course be consistent with – and driven by – national strategies and planned in partnership with government, the private sector and civil society.
Twenty years ago, world leaders, frustrated that lifesaving vaccines were not reaching the hundreds of millions of people who needed them, created Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance. They invested billions of dollars to scale up these innovations, helped immunize more than 1 billion children and halved infant mortality in 78 low-income countries.
This year, officials at COP28 are aiming for a similar global response to climate change, food security and agriculture.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization providing facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world.
It was written by: Paul Winters, University of Notre Dame.
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Paul Winters receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for work on the Innovation Commission for Climate Change, Food Security and Agriculture. He is executive director of the Innovation Commission for Climate Change, Food Security and Agriculture, based out of the University of Chicago’s Development Innovation Lab. He also provides unpaid technical support to the COP28 Presidency Food System Initiative on the innovation pillar.
