COP31: Climate disruption puts farmers and global food supplies under pressure

Extreme heat, exacerbated by El Niño, is pushing global food production to its limits. Ahead of the COP31 climate conference, the Food and Agriculture Organization pushed to move food systems to the forefront of climate action. At the heart of the FAO's mission are farmers, already grappling with severe volatility driven by erratic weather. Without intervention, the economic fallout hits the most vulnerable the hardest. We're helping them to make their agriculture more sustainable, more resilient and more inclusive. But number one in an El Niño year is early warning. Help get information into the hands of the farmers of what is around the corner, so they can adjust what they plant, when they plant, when they sow, etc. The World Food Programme warns an additional 49 million people worldwide will be pushed into acute food insecurity by the end of the year, with nearly a 50% surge across Latin America and the Caribbean alone. However, scaling solutions requires closing a severe funding gap. The number one message on climate finance is that there is not enough of it going towards solutions that are only in agriculture. And food systems and the investments going in that direction are going down rather than up, which is a massive missed opportunity. Bridging that financial gap is now an economic imperative. Experts stress that climate finance can transform agriculture, but only if global investments reach the communities on the front lines of climate impacts.