Growing Returns

Animal health is key to healthy people and planet

Molly Nyambura, member of Lynjack self-help group, working in her farm in Kiambu County. Photo courtesy of USAID Kenya.

Maintaining animal health isn’t only an essential practice for livestock farming, though any farmer or rancher will agree that’s true. It’s also a way to lower the methane intensity of the meat and dairy produced by livestock and improve health and livelihoods for people, which is particularly important for smallholder farmers in low-income countries.

Livestock farming contributes more than one-third of human-caused methane emissions, a powerful super-pollutant responsible for much of the additional warming and extreme weather the world is facing. At the same time, animal agriculture both provides critical nutrition and supports the livelihoods of millions of families, benefits that are now at risk due to heatwaves, droughts and other climate impacts. 

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Without financing solutions, farmers have to leave money — and environmental benefits — on the table

This op-ed was originally published in Hoard’s Dairyman. Since its initial publication, the financial uncertainty for farmers engaging in conservation practices has grown substantially. Ongoing trade negotiations, tariffs and blocked funding for existing U.S. Department of Agriculture contracts for conservation expenses and the uncertainty of future funding for conservation programs intensify the financial challenges faced by dairy farmers.

Dairy farmers are already part of a high-risk industry — the experience shared below shows how difficult it can be to align funding opportunities with farms’ financial needs. Now, farmers are being left to absorb that risk with less support. To continue producing food for their communities and responsibly stewarding natural resources, farmers will need more flexibility from financial institutions and greater investments from stakeholders advancing sustainable agriculture.

By Alice Crothers

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Four takeaways from a year of global action on food, agriculture and climate

farm in a landscape with fields

Global leaders increasingly recognize that agriculture and food systems must be part of solutions to the climate crisis. From the first Food Systems Pavilion at a UN climate conference in 2022, to 160 countries recognizing food and agriculture as a climate imperative in 2023, food advocates came into the 2024 UN climate conference, COP29, with wind in our sails. We made progress, but the world needs to do more — and quickly.

As we close out the year and look ahead to COP30 in late 2025, significantly more work remains to ensure farmers, fishers and ranchers can feed a growing population and lower climate pollution from food systems.

Here are four reflections from EDF and our partners about the progress made this year and the urgent work that remains to make farms and food systems more resilient, sustainable and equitable.

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To feed a growing population, farmers need quality financing to flow

Farmers harvesting coffee in the countryside of Brazil.

Agriculture is both a driver of climate change and on the frontlines of climate impacts. A variety of farming practices, technologies and system changes can reduce emissions to help stabilize the climate and build resilience to help protect global food production. However, a lack of access to fit-for-purpose finance keeps farmers from transitioning to climate-smart farming practices.

This year at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, countries will gather to set a new global climate finance goal, known as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), for how much money high-income countries will provide to low-income countries for climate action.

This negotiation presents an opportunity to elevate farmers’ needs in financing the climate transition in agriculture.

Agriculture needs significantly more climate financing

Increasing access to and availability of climate finance for farmers and agricultural value chains is vital for fostering resilience, food security and sustainable agriculture globally in the face of climate change. Yet, less than 5% of climate finance today — around $28.5 billion USD annually — goes to agrifood systems even though the sector contributes nearly one-third of global emissions and has a pressing need for adaptation.

UNEP finds that the world needs $350 billion per year by the end of this decade to close the funding gap for transforming food systems and meeting climate mitigation and adaptation targets. Agriculture is critically underfunded when it comes to climate finance, and an urgent increase in dedicated funding is essential to safeguard our food system.

Farmers also need higher quality climate financing

As the global community works to finalize a new climate finance goal, boosting the quality of climate finance is just as important as scaling the quantity of climate finance. We need to ensure money is accessible to the countries and communities that need it the most without creating more financial burdens on them.

EDF’s new report, Quality Matters: Strengthening Climate Finance to Drive Climate Action, further outlines why strengthening the quality of international climate finance is essential.

Agriculture has unique financing needs, and the transition to climate-smart agriculture at scale will require transformative investment from both the public and private sectors. For farming systems to shift, the market, finance and insurance systems that are the bedrock of farm businesses must also change. Yet, at present, these systems leave many farmers locked in the status quo and increasingly vulnerable to devastating financial losses. In addition, many other farmers do not have access to basic finance and market services.

High-quality climate finance, which considers the criteria below, can bridge these gaps.

  • Accessibility: Finance should directly reach farmers when they need it to help them invest in on-farm practice changes and technology for climate adaptation. Funding should be easy for farmers to access by reducing application burdens and delays and, ideally, distributing it through trusted local partnerships.
  • Impact: Finance should be targeted toward practices, technologies and system changes that reduce emissions or improve climate resilience. Systems for measuring, monitoring, reporting and verifying environmental impacts must be both accurate and practical for farmers and their partners.
  • Concessionality: Given the thin margins of most farming systems, finance providers should expect that below-market rate returns will often be required to achieve desired environmental and social impacts. Finance should address inequities in farmer access, while not increasing the burden of unsustainable debt at either the country or farmer level. Concessional finance should be leveraged to encourage more private sector finance to participate in solutions, helping to improve climate finance quantity and quality.

As the global community strives to set and meet ambitious climate finance targets, both quantity and quality must remain at the heart of discussions. Climate finance providers need to increase the total amount of financing available for investing in agriculture’s climate transition. At the same time, finance providers must assess how the structure of the financing they offer measures up against indicators of quality — accessibility, impact and concessionality.

The only way to ensure that both quantity and quality priorities are met is by listening to and learning from farmers, farmer organizations and their supporting partners.

By strengthening our collective focus on delivering sufficient high-quality climate finance, we can turn ambition into action — enabling farmers to build a low-carbon, resilient and abundant food system.

 

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How a producer-led movement to diversify food production can strengthen global food supply

As the world faces growing climate impacts and shocks, the need for a more sustainable and resilient food system has never been more urgent. Last year, the Kansas wheat harvest, known as a bellwether for global agriculture, hit a 60-year low due to severe drought. Record-breaking floods decimated European harvests in the same year.  

Climate-driven impacts, such as prolonged droughts, severe floods and unprecedented temperature shifts are already creating lasting repercussions for global agricultural and fishing communities. This instability affects local communities, jeopardizing livelihoods and food security. One strategy to enhance the resilience of aquatic and terrestrial food systems is food production diversification.  Read More »

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Revisiting a centuries-old approach to farming that embraces water scarcity.

As discussions at COP28 wrestle with climate impacts on global food and water security, we hear from a Hopi farmer on his thriving practice of dry farming and his hopes for shared learning in Dubai.

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The arid climate of the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona receives a mere 8.5 inches of annual rainfall. For perspective, the yearly United States average is 30 inches. Despite this severe aridity, for over 3,000 years, the Hopi people have stewarded an extraordinary agricultural tradition centered on dry farming.

Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson is an Indigenous Resiliency Specialist at the University of Arizona and a leading practitioner of Hopi dry farming — a form of agriculture that eschews irrigation in regions with limited water moisture. As a 250th-generation Hopi dry farmer, his ongoing traditional practices are a  testament to the power of cultural values and the potential of climate-adaptive farming. These ongoing Hopi farming practices defy modern notions of crop needs and vulnerability in areas with limited irrigation and water supply.

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