{"id":18777,"date":"2017-11-15T12:54:04","date_gmt":"2017-11-15T17:54:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/?p=18777"},"modified":"2026-04-02T15:39:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T20:39:23","slug":"agriculture-negotiations-reach-agreement-at-cop23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2017\/11\/15\/agriculture-negotiations-reach-agreement-at-cop23\/","title":{"rendered":"Agriculture negotiations reach agreement at COP23"},"content":{"rendered":"

In what could be the iconic decision of COP 23, negotiators in Bonn agreed to new future negotiation processes to \u201cjointly address\u201d a number of new agriculture topics, overcoming longstanding hurdles that had blocked progress on the topic in recent years.<\/p>\n

Why is this important?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Emissions from agriculture are expected to continue growing as the world\u2019s population continues to expand and diets change with rising incomes.<\/p>\n

However, a recent journal article<\/a> by Griscom et al. published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found activities under the agriculture and grasslands rubric, such as management of fertilizer use, could achieve roughly 6% of needed emission reductions to stay below a 2 degree temperature change. To realize that potential though, farmers need new tools and incentives.<\/p>\n

Additionally, farmers are expecting to find their jobs of growing our food harder as climate change makes weather patterns more unpredictable, and makes climatic events such as droughts and flooding more frequent and intense. Farmers will also need new methods and technologies to make their farms more resilient and adapt to the new conditions.<\/p>\n

Agriculture has been discussed for years, but progress had been stymied by disagreement<\/a> related to potential trade implications on key commodity exports, whether to prioritize adaptation or mitigation in the agenda, and UNFCCC process-oriented concerns on what could and couldn\u2019t be negotiated based on the last agriculture decision.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s in the decision?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The negotiators agreed to have the Subsidiary Body for Science and Technological Advice (SBSTA) and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) review issues associated with agriculture by using workshops and technical expert meetings.<\/p>\n

Using both the SBI and SBSTA to review a topic \u201cjointly\u201d is not a frequent negotiation strategy pursued by negotiators. That\u2019s because the complexity of the negotiation rises exponentially when a topic is jointly negotiated rather than negotiated in a single process. But this process was used for the set of policy approaches for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+), which ended up being the only sector with its own article in the Paris Agreement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Regarding topics in agriculture that the processes might first consider, they include:<\/p>\n