ClimateShot: SPARC joins COP26 campaign to support innovation in agriculture and achieve climate goals

Transforming how we produce food lies at the heart of achieving the goals of the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 - which takes place from October 31 to November 12.  Many agricultural methods damage natural resources and ecosystems, and hamper efforts to achieve global climate ambitions. Climate change is also impacting food systems, and making it harder to feed the world’s 7.7 billion people.

We all know that ‘business as usual’ is not working. Innovation has the potential to play a defining role in supporting agriculture to become more sustainable, climate-resilient and climate-smart. So Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crisis (SPARC) has joined the Global Action Agenda on Agricultural Innovation – or ClimateShot, which will be launched at COP26 on November 6, 2021.

The campaign is a global effort led by Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) in partnership with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).

It calls for practitioners, governments, donors, people whose livelihoods depend on food production and those living with the impacts of climate change to work together to secure international commitments to:

• Increase investment in agricultural research and innovation to create more climate-resilient, low-emission technologies and practices;

• Ensure at least a third of agricultural research and innovation investments deliver demand-driven solutions across food systems, to protect nature and limit climate change;

• Showcase successful business models and promote public-private partnerships that deploy these innovations on the scale needed to meet the climate and food security challenge;

• Forge consensus on the evidence of what works, and facilitate inclusive dialogue among food and climate champions around the world.

The campaign links the ambitions of COP26 with those outlined at the UN Food Systems Summit in September this year. 

In SPARC, we recognise that by working with donors and practitioners, and pastoralists, agropastoralists and farmers in drylands in fragile and conflict-affected regions, we can support these areas to adopt new methods and technologies. Alongside existing indigenous and local knowledge, these innovations can pave the way for sustainable, climate-smart and climate-resilient food production.

Our research is rooted in providing policy- and decision-makers with the knowledge they need to support programmes and policies that can harness the power of innovation to support the transformation of global food systems and achieve global climate ambitions.

Find out more about SPARC events at COP26 here, and watch a film about the #ClimateShot campaign here.