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Growing up on a small rice farm in China in the 1960s, my family was keenly aware that any single adverse weather event could wipe out a year’s worth of effort.

The climate and weather patterns are something a farmer feels in his bones, but changes in these patterns and the extremity of events have, in recent years, shocked rural communities.

We never imagined seasons might alter at the pace and scale we see today, bringing losses and damage that undermine years of hard-won rural development.

The changing climate has become a food and agriculture crisis. Small-scale farmers are increasingly at the mercy of climate-induced disasters and extreme events.

Given the total reliance on weather patterns and natural resources for healthy yields and produce, the agrifood sector is on the frontline of the climate crisis.

Climate change is affecting our capacity to produce food, altering the availability, accessibility, and affordability of food, as well as the quality of water, soil, and biodiversity, increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, and shifting the patterns of pests and diseases.

These impacts increase food insecurity, reducing crop yields, livestock productivity, and the potential of fisheries and aquaculture as food producers.

Over the last 30 years, an estimated USD 3.8 trillion worth of crops and livestock production has been lost due to climate and other disaster events, corresponding to an average loss of USD 123 billion per year, or 5 percent of annual global agricultural GDP.

These disaster events have also been increasing, from around one hundred per year in the 1970s to a current average of four hundred per year.

As agriculture, including crops and livestock production, forestry, fisheries, and aquaculture, is one of the main economic activities in developing countries, the implications are profound.

Farmers are resilient and have for centuries adapted to changes in their environments. They are the best investment in building resilience and adapting to climate change. But what they are experiencing today goes beyond their ability to adapt.

Support in dealing with both the economic and non-economic losses and damage caused by extreme and slow onset events is becoming a lifeline for farming communities and countries.

Getting the loss and damage funding up and running and, most important of all, distributing finance for loss and damage will be a litmus test for success at the United Nations COP28 climate summit.

Our latest report on Loss and Damage in Agrifood Systems, which will be launched at COP28, reveals that over a third of countries’ climate commitments or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) explicitly refer to loss and damage. For those countries referring to loss and damage, agriculture is overall found to be the single most impacted sector.

FAO is committed to supporting countries to assessing the extent and magnitude of loss and damage caused by the impacts of the climate crisis on the agrifood sectors; mobilizing adequate and predictable financial resources to support the implementation of loss and damage actions in the sector; assessing climate risks; reducing loss and damage in agriculture; and developing new technologies and practices that can reduce the exposure and vulnerability of food producers and consumers to climate risks, such as drought-tolerant crops, water-efficient irrigation systems, early warning systems, crop insurance and social protection schemes.

The climate and food crises are inseparable. Investing in agrifood systems solutions to climate change will bring big rewards for people and for the planet. But not even the most resilient farmers can adapt to all the effects of the climate crisis.

Small-scale farmers and agriculture-dependent developing countries must be at the forefront of our collective efforts to address the consequent loss and damage.

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RCCs are centers of excellence that strengthen the capacity of WMO Members in each region to deliver the best climate services to national users.

RCC regional products include climate data sets, monitoring products, and long-range forecasts.

Being the second international meteorological center established in the last 63 years in Iran, it will be set up 11 years after the announcement of Iran’s request.

The regional climate centers have so far been set up in China, Japan, South Korea, and India.

RCCs are the middle tier in a three-tiered WMO operational infrastructure that supports National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) to generate and deliver up-to-date climate information and products for climate services.

RCCs and NMHSs are supported by WMO-designated Global Producing Centers for Long-Range Forecasts (GPCLRFs), which have been established to provide a range of global long-range forecasting products. RCCs are being implemented across all WMO regional associations.

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The COP26 is the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is being held in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom, from October 31 to November 12.

The Iranian delegation will also attend the World Summit from November 8, ISNA reported on Monday.

The COP26 summit will bring parties together to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The venue for the conference is the SEC Centre in Glasgow. Originally due to be held in November 2020 at the same venue, the event was postponed for twelve months because of the COVID-19 pandemic in Scotland.

Climate change impact
Increasing consumption of fossil fuels by humans, especially after the Industrial Revolution, has led to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions and ultimately climate change, and now tackling this phenomenon has become one of the most important concerns worldwide.

Climate change is one of the most important problems in Iran that can exacerbate drought and water stress, so it is necessary to make serious plans at the national level to address the phenomena.

Based on research and assessments conducted by Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and using scenarios proposed by the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if the concentration of carbon dioxide doubles by 2100, Iran’s average temperature will increase by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius.

Temperature change, sea-level rise, coastal degradation, destruction of agricultural and food products, deforestation, depletion of freshwater resources, regional climate change in the high and northern hemispheres, changes in rainfall and wind direction, rising natural disasters such as tornadoes and floods, intensifying droughts and developing desert areas, increasing air pollution due to rising hot winds and the potential impact on the spread of diseases such as malaria are some of the known consequences of climate change.

According to scientists, global warming due to climate change is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century.

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The shortfall of eight percentage points translates into around 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) pumped into the air annually.

German politicians had already acknowledged they would not meet the 2020 target in coalition negotiations ahead of Merkel’s swearing-in for her fourth term.

“We must urgently get back on track and reach our 40-percent goal as quickly as possible,” Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said in a statement.

“We know the instruments that can get us to the target — renewable energy or electric cars, for example.”

The environment ministry blamed three main factors for the slower progress: overestimates of how much CO2 would be saved under existing plans, faster-than-expected economic growth and a faster-growing population than forecast.

In fact, “current trends in economic performance and traffic figures are cause for concern that the gap might end up even larger than the 8.0 points predicted,” the ministry said.

Germany has a 2050 climate goal to reduce CO2 emissions by between 80 and 95 percent compared with 1990, and is a signatory to the 2015 Paris agreement that aims to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But the government pulls in sometimes contradictory directions, turning to dirty brown coal to offset Merkel’s 2011 decision to shut down all nuclear plants by 2022 and backing the car industry’s fixation on the internal combustion engine.

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The Paris Agreement goal of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius will slip beyond reach unless nations act now to slash carbon pollution, curb energy demand, and suck CO2 from the air, according to a draft UN report.

Without such efforts, “holding warming to 1.5 C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the 21st century [is] extremely unlikely,” said the 1,000-page report, prepared by hundreds of scientists.

“There is a very high risk that under current emissions trajectories, and current national pledges, global warming will exceed 1.5 C above preindustrial levels.”

On current trends, Earth’s thermometer will cross that threshold in the 2040s, said the report.

The greenhouse gas emissions guaranteeing that outcome will have been released within 10 to 15 years.

Under any scenario, there is no model that projects a 66-percent-or-better chance of holding global warming below 1.5 C, the synthesis of recent scientific studies concluded.

With only a single degree Celsius of warming so far, our planet is already coping with a crescendo of climate impacts including deadly droughts, erratic rainfall, and storm surges engorged by rising seas.

The landmark, 197-nation climate treaty, inked in 2015, calls for limiting global warming to “well under” 2 C, and “pursuing efforts” for the 1.5 C cap.

All countries made voluntary carbon-cutting pledges, running out to 2030.

At the same time, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) was mandated to prepare a special 1.5 C report covering impacts and feasibility.

The final version, vetted by governments, will be unveiled in October.

– Moral hazard –

Pressure for the lower temperature target and the report came from nations whose fate could turn on the half-degree difference between a 1.5 C and 2 C world.

Rising seas, for example, threaten the existence of small island states and could displace tens of millions in Bangladesh, Vietnam and other counties with densely populated river deltas.

“There is a tipping point on sea level rise” — driven mainly by melting icesheets on Greenland and Antarctica — “somewhere between 1.5 C and 2 C,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

“With 2C, according to our models, sea level will just keep on rising,” he told AFP.

The pathways that do exist for stabilising at 1.5 C would require breaching that threshold and then dialling down Earth’s surface temperature by drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere and then using if for fuel or storing it underground.

None of technologies that do this exist today on an industrial scale, and some experts fear the long-shot 1.5 C target could pose problems of its own.

“Any scenario for 1.5 C stabilisation likely requires a dubious dependence on ‘negative emissions’ technologies, whereas 2 C stabilisation is still possible without that,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

The lure of silver-bullet fixes, he and others point out, could weaken resolve to reduce greenhouse emissions at their source — an unintended side-effect known as “moral hazard”.

Ensuring even a 50/50 chance of a 1.5 C world would require the equivalent of a climate change Marshall Plan, the study concluded.

– Lifestyle changes –

By 2050, carbon dioxide emissions would need to fall to “net” zero, meaning that any CO2 released into the air would have to be offset. Renewable energy sources — mainly solar and wind — would by then be the dominant energy source, and burning coal a distant memory.

Other planet-warming gases such as methane and HFCs would also have to be drastically reduced.

“Rapid and large-scale behaviour and lifestyle changes,” such as a shift away from eating meat, will also be essential, the report said.

“We don’t have any margin for less than total commitment,” said Chris Field, Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment in California and a former co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group II.

“Tackling climate is making serious investments more than making exactly the right mix of investments.”

IPCC officials and scientists cautioned that the report — which has already gone through three rounds of editing by scientists — is bound to change before it is approved by governments at a meeting in October.

“Drafts are collective works-in-progress that do not necessarily represent the IPCC’s final assessment,” said IPCC spokesman Jonathan Lynn.

The current review cycle is the first in which government officials will submit comments.

“The final approval process is a dialogue between governments — which have requested and will use the report — and the scientists who have written it,” he told AFP.

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The US President’s decision to yank the United States from the hard-fought global pact cast a long shadow over the talks, which ran deep into overtime. Negotiations were marked by revived divisions between developing countries and rich ones.

With a wary eye on America, which sent negotiators to a forum it intends to quit, envoys from nearly 200 countries got on with the business of designing a “rule book” for enacting the agreement, which enters into full force in three years’ time.

“The Trump administration failed to stop the global climate talks from moving forward,” said Greenpeace observer Jens Mattias Clausen.

Closing two weeks of talks, negotiators agreed in the early hours of Saturday to hold a stocktake in 2018 of national efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions.

The Paris treaty calls for limiting average global warming to “well under” two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels, or 1.5 C if possible.

Anything over 2 C, experts say, dooms the world to calamitous climate change, with more extreme superstorms, droughts, floods, and land-gobbling sea level rise.

A report this week warned that emissions of carbon dioxide, the main planet-warming gas, were set to rise by two percent in 2017 after three years of hardly any growth.

“Starting now, emissions need to decrease to zero over the next 40 years to prevent us breaching the 1.5 C threshold,” Piers Forster, a professor of climate change at the University of Leeds, said.

Nations have submitted voluntary emissions-cutting commitments under the Paris pact championed by Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.

But scientists say current pledges place the world on course for warming of 3 C or more, and counsel an urgent upgrade of the global commitment to phasing out greenhouse gases produced by burning coal, oil and natural gas.

– Islands in peril –

“While the Paris Agreement represents a remarkable diplomatic achievement, it will be judged by history as little more than words on paper if the world fails to take the level of action needed to prevent the loss of entire island nations,” Maldives environment minister Thoriq Ibrahim told delegates Friday.

The stocktake agreed Saturday must quantify the shortfall to determine what more needs to be done.

In Bonn, negotiators also worked on a nuts-and-bolts rulebook, to be finalised at the next UN climate conference in Katowice, Poland in December 2018, for putting the Paris Agreement into action.

Some progress was made, but observers and delegates complained that things were moving too slowly.

Many lamented the void in “political leadership” left by the departure of Obama, and by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s failure to set a timetable for phasing out coal-fired power plants, which produce 40 percent of Germany’s electricity.

The talks saw rich and poor nations butt heads on several issues — mainly money.

Developing countries demand detailed progress reports on rich nations’ promise to boost climate finance to $100 billion (85 billion euros) per year by 2020.

The world’s poorer nations — often the first to feel the sting of climate change impacts — need cash to make the costly shift away from atmosphere-fouling coal, and to shore up their defences against extreme weather.

Donor nations, in turn, insists that emissions cuts by developing countries be subject to verification.

– Act, soon –

The United States, which under Trump has slashed funding for climate bodies and projects, took a tough stance in the finance negotiations in Bonn, a position that angered some delegates.

Adding to the tension, White House officials and energy company executives hosted an event on the conference margins to defend the use of fossil fuels.

On Thursday, 20 governments from both wealthy and developing nations, led by Britain and Canada, countered with the launch of a coal phase-out initiative.

The United States is the world’s biggest historical greenhouse gas polluter, second only to China.

“In a year marked by extreme weather disasters and potentially the first increase in carbon emissions in four years, the paradox between what we are doing and need to be delivering is clear,” WWF climate head Manuel Pulgar-Vidal said of the talks.

“Countries must act with greater climate ambition, and soon.”

Observers hope that the “One Planet Summit” hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on December 12 will boost momentum.

Macron has invited some 100 heads of state and government, but not Trump, as well as business leaders, to discuss finance for climate projects.

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