Host: Mercy Corps
Producers and entrepreneurs in food systems that contribute least to the climate crisis are already living with its consequences every day. In settings where environmental and institutional fragility converge— from Somalia and Nigeria to Syria and Yemen — recurrent droughts, floods, and economic shocks are colliding with instability, undermining food production, markets, and nutrition. Yet these same landscapes hold immense potential to drive climate action and stability if investments shift from short-term response to long-term resilience.
This session explores how food systems — spanning production, processing, and consumption — can become a powerful vehicle for climate adaptation and co-benefits, advancing food security, livelihoods, and emissions reduction at once, even in places historically dependent on humanitarian aid. It will bring together government, donor, private sector, and implementing partners to discuss how to move from reactive humanitarian cycles to climate readiness: integrating anticipatory action, locally led adaptation, and risk-layered finance into food systems strengthening.
As COP30 advances discussions on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), the discussion will examine how fragile and conflict-affected states can be better included in adaptation frameworks and climate finance pipelines. Importantly, based on a recent paper highlighting that private sector investments can only fund a limited set of solutions or adaptation, the session will also argue for more concessional finance and grants to go to fragile places, and not deepen debt burdens for food systems adaptation
With less than 4% of global climate finance currently reaching food systems — and even less flowing to fragile contexts — participants will consider what new financial instruments and partnerships are needed to turn crisis spending into climate investment, and to enable just rural transitions that allow these regions to leapfrog toward more resilient, low-carbon futures.