New four-year work program negotiated by parties to pursue climate action on agriculture and food security 

By Annika McGinnis

The climate crisis is a water crisis. As the world has warmed more than 1.1 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, people are facing either too much water – or too little. At the 27th UN climate conference held this month in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, thousands of people gathered to take stock of the world’s efforts to fight climate change and propose solutions. A key theme emerged: Get out of our comfort zones and collaborate across countries, sectors and interests, if we want to feed the world as resources become scarce.

A water-energy-food nexus

More than 733 million people around the world are facing critical levels of water stress. Prices for food, fuel and fertilizer are unprecedented. Food insecurity is also on the rise. 

The scale of the crisis is alarming. The number of people who are severely food insecure increased from 135 million before Covid-19 to 276 million at the start of 2022 to 323 million due to war in 2022, according to GIZ, the German development agency.

In the Horn of Africa, which includes Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, at least 36 million people are currently suffering from an unprecedented drought driven by climate change. The crisis has destroyed pasture and dried up water points, leading to starvation, disease outbreaks and loss of livelihoods.

Droughts are the top killer in Africa among weather, water and climate-related hazards, leading to the loss of more than 695,000 lives in the past 50 years, according to the UN weather agency WMO.

But for too long, water, agriculture and energy sectors have operated in silos, with conflicting policies that have failed to solve the worsening crisis of declining water available for a growing number of people.

In trying to come up with solutions, “water people talk to water people, and that doesn’t bring us too far,” said Julia Weatherhogg, an adaptation officer at UN climate change agency UNFCCC.

Instead, at the 27th United Nations Conference of the Parties that ran for two weeks this November, institutions working across the realms of water, energy and food pushed for integration of their policies and programs to address the climate crisis and equitably supply food and water to a growing population.

The so-called ‘water-energy-food nexus’ provides a holistic and integrated approach that aims to secure access to water, energy and food in the long term. In a draft outcome from COP, countries agreed to pursue a range of holistic climate actions on agriculture and food security.

This approach involves policy coordination at the highest level, where ministries charged with water, agriculture and energy have often diverged. An example of such conflicting policies is where “the agriculture ministry wants to reclaim more land, but the water ministry wants to maximize efficiency of water resources on existing land,” said Kibrom Abay, country program leader at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

Such policies must also be integrated with the production of energy, such as hydropower, said Eddie Rich, the CEO of the International Hydropower Association. As the largest in terms of all the renewable energy resources, hydropower can be used as a potential back-up for wind and solar, Rich said. Dams also impact irrigation, water supply, transportation, and freshwater species.

Dozens of dams have been built along the Nile River in eastern Africa in recent years for energy and irrigation, most notably the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which is now the largest hydroelectric power dam on the continent and has caused tensions between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt over water resources sharing. 

At the same time, water resources including the Nile are increasingly under pressure. The first-of-its-kind Global Water Resources Report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) found large areas of the globe under drier than normal conditions, the WMO presented at COP. Using flow data from 7 global models, satellite data and literature, the analysis showed a majority of the world’s ‘river discharge conditions’ – the volume of water flowing through rivers – below historical averages from the last 30 years. 

The Nile River basin contains 11 countries in east and northeastern Africa with highly diverse climates, cultures and socioeconomic levels. While growing populations, irrigation and energy needs are affecting demand for Nile waters across all countries in the basin, the arid downstream countries are under particular water stress as the world has warmed.

The Egyptian government recently announced that the country has entered a state of “water poverty” by UN standards, according to CNN. Egypt is exploring producing freshwater from recycled wastewater and seawater to try to fill its water deficit.  

But even as water becomes scarcer in the Nile Basin, too often the use of water for energy is not coordinated with its use for agriculture, consumption and to sustain natural ecosystems. This creates misalignment and inefficiencies, experts pressed at COP27.

To address this, UNFCCC has recently launched a new alliance composed of UN, government, private and funding bodies to try to harmonize and streamline siloed policies and advocate for water-energy-food policy coordination at the highest level, according to Weatherhogg. 

At COP27, parties established a four-year joint work program on implementation of climate action on agriculture and food security. The decision promotes a holistic approach, “enhancing coherence, synergies, coordination, communication and interaction between Parties, constituted bodies and workstreams, the operating entities of the Financial Mechanism, the Adaptation Fund, the Least Developed Countries Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund in order to facilitate the implementation of action to address issues related to agriculture and food security.” 

This program aims to bring together national, regional and international stakeholders to focus on both mitigating climate change caused by food systems and helping the agricultural sector adapt to climate effects. Small-scale farmers that depend on rainfall to grow their crops have especially suffered from changes in weather patterns. 

By March 2023, parties should submit their views on the food security project and establishment of a joint online portal to share information, according to the negotiated decision.

However, while there has been success in creating a “consensus” on the need for new holistic approaches, there is “still a long way to go on the ground,” said Abay of IFPRI.

Development partners agreed. “In practice, the financing to these kind of broad sector-wide approaches is still the exception rather than the norm,” said Christiane Ehringhaus, the senior sector economist on agriculture and rural development at the KFW Development Bank. 

“Development banks are not good at dealing with complex intersectional approaches. Our partner governments are not good at it either. So we need to get better at embracing complexity,” Ehringhaus said.

The economist urged governments to improve their policy environments to attract more funding. “Ambitious and high-ownership approaches” are those that banks such as KFW can support, she said.

Critical data gaps must also be addressed in the hydrological sector, with comprehensive data on the state of water resources provided to governments along with capacity building training in how to use it to make informed decisions, according to the WMO.

While linkages are still being coordinated at the highest levels, entrepreneurs in the Nile Basin are developing holistic solutions at the grassroots that address the food shortage while restoring ecosystems. An example is Safi Organics based in Kenya, which is producing natural fertilizers using farm waste. 

Since these fertilizers are locally produced and used, they avoid the high transportation fees for fertilizer imports that have led to skyrocketing prices of fertilizers in the Nile Basin, which have been exacerbated by fuel hikes and supply chain backlogs due to Covid and the war in Ukraine. The organic fertilizers also save water, restore the health of lands that have been degraded by chemical fertilizers, and boost crop yields by about 30 percent. 

“Our government is looking to subsidize imported fertilizers. They should instead look at subsidizing locally produced products,” said Samuel Wanderi Rigu, the Safi Organics CEO.

Such natural solutions also support biodiversity, the variety of plant and animal life in habitats. Changes in land use driven by large-scale agriculture causes about 30 percent of biodiversity loss globally.

While most of the global attention has been focused on COP27, the climate and biodiversity crises are “two sides of the same coin,” said Li Shuo, Global Policy Advisor for Greenpeace East Asia. For example, biodiverse natural ecosystems such as forests and wetlands can help reduce climate change and its effects. When they are destroyed, climate change worsens.

Most world leaders were invited to this year’s UN conference on climate change, but few are planning to attend the UN Biodiversity Conference scheduled for December 7-19 in Montreal, Canada, said Melanie Coath, senior climate change policy officer at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the UK. 

However, one crisis can’t be addressed without the other, urged the group of environmental advocates convened by the Climate Action Network at COP27. Scientists predict that on our current path of climate change and loss of habitats, almost 40 percent of all species may go extinct by the end of this century.

According to Mina Guli, a water activist from Australia, the barrier to collective action is vested interest. We need to shift our individualistic mindset, she said.

“People need to look at a river basin as a whole so that it becomes common interest. We need to shift to that ‘aha’ moment where ‘I can’t get what I want unless we get what we want,’” she said.

Guli came to Sharm el-Sheikh in the Sinai Peninsula on foot, running through Oman into Egypt. Since her engagements at the climate conference, she has already completed her 128th #RunBlue marathon in London. 

She won’t stop until rivers are given the protection they deserve, she said.

“We are talking about protecting the arteries of our world. The children of today depend on us to make the right decisions,” she said.

Toward a rights-based approach 

In Sharm el-Sheikh, the official negotiations dragged on behind closed doors, with sessions scheduled into the wee hours of the morning and countries battling it out over the technicalities of the global climate agreement. The key achievement of this year’s negotiations was establishing a dedicated finance facility to help developing countries mitigate the loss and damage caused by climate change. 

But on the sidelines of the negotiations, scores of international NGOs, community-based organizations, scientists and activists presented their innovations and visions of the future, most emphasizing a common theme of cross-sector collaboration to save the world as we know it. 

As authoritarianism rises around the world, protecting legal rights – both of humans and of the environment – made up a key pillar of discourse. 

Should a natural resource like a river or a forest have its own rights? This question was pivotal to a discussion at the Canada Pavilion led by an organization called OIDN (Observatoire International des Droits de la Nature), which recently published the book A Legal Personality for the St. Lawrence River and other Rivers of the World.

Ensuring rights to nature also defends the rights of indigenous people and others who depend on and take care of nature and its ecosystems, according to the book authors.

“The most endangered rivers in the world include the Nile. We need tangible action to protect rivers, give them a legal identity and guarantee them the rights they deserve,” said Daniel Turp, one of the co-authors who is a law professor at the Université de Montréal.

Social and environmental justice was front and center at COP27, where Action for Sustainable Development, a global civil society network, launched a new online platform to bring together climate and social justice activists. The platform, called Zovu, aims to create alliances, share stories and help grassroots activists mobilize funding.

International actors also emphasized the importance of bottom-up project design, where top-level strategies are informed by local knowledge and solutions.

Sea level rise is a huge problem in Egypt’s Nile Delta, where swaths of precious coastline are under threat of reclamation by the Mediterranean Sea. Dr. Mohamed Ahmed, a project executive manager with UNDP and the Green Climate Fund, credited the success of his project that tackled this issue to the local knowledge from communities who live along the coastline. 

“We asked the people who live there, ‘what do you do? You are flooded every year.’ And they gave us a billion solutions that they use to protect their land and properties… [for example], they surround the houses with dunes, and then this water is stopped from reaching their houses,” Ahmed said. 

“We were able to mix these solutions with engineering designs and upscaled these solutions to five governorates in Egypt. It is now protecting more than three quarters of the people affected by sea level rise and has billions of dollars of investment in the Nile delta.”

In the realm of water for sanitation and hygiene, coined as WASH, climate policy must also be aligned with WASH strategies at all levels, announced a coalition of dozens of top global businesses that came together to launch the “WASH 4 Work” declaration. Access to clean water and toilets is essential to a productive and healthy workforce, which must now also take into account the risks of climate disasters such as droughts and floods that affect sanitation infrastructure.

Indigenous groups, women and girls, the elderly, and other vulnerable populations such as persons with disabilities are uniquely affected by challenges of access to water. Providing water for food, agriculture, energy and sanitation in an increasingly water-scarce region must put at its heart principles of justice and equity, said Ambrose Murangira, manager of Light for the World’s Disability Inclusion Advisory Unit in Uganda. 

As droughts dry up water points, people have to walk farther to fetch water, and water points are often slippery and cumbersome. This means water points must be designed in an inclusive way that makes them accessible for persons with special needs, Murangira said using sign language. Making sure such interventions are appropriately included in water projects also requires collection of much more comprehensive data about special populations beyond basic indicators like prevalence of disabilities.

The ultimate goal is to ensure that no one gets left behind in the “just transition” – the climate jargon meaning the steps needed to secure the rights and livelihoods of all people as world economies move toward sustainable production and consumption.

“If we are managing these ecosystems in silos, then we are leading to a demise,” said Ruth Mathews, senior manager of the Action Platform for Source-to-Sea Management at the Stockholm International Water Institute. “A holistic approach will keep us within the 1.5 degree target and help us adapt and be resilient.

“I believe in people and all of us. But there’s a comfort zone that we like to live in. We stay in what we know and it’s hard for us to step out. We need behavior change and it takes courage,” Mathews said.

This story was produced by InfoNile