Editing IPCC:AR6/SRCCL/Chapter-5 (section)

=== 5.1.4 Food systems in AR5, SR15, and the Paris Agreement ===

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Food, and its relationship to the environment and climate change, has grown in prominence since the Rio Declaration in 1992, where food production is Chapter 14 of Agenda 21, to the Paris Agreement of 2015, which includes the need to ensure food security under the threat of climate change on its first page. This growing prominence of food is reflected in recent IPCC reports, including its Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC 2014a <sup>[[#fn:r130|130]]</sup> ) and the Special Report on global warming of 1.5°C (SR15) (IPCC 2018a <sup>[[#fn:r131|131]]</sup> ).

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==== 5.1.4.1 Food systems in AR5 and SR15 ====

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The IPCC Working Group (WG) II AR5 chapter on Food Security and Food Production Systems broke new ground by expanding its focus beyond the effects of climate change primarily on agricultural production (crops, livestock and aquaculture) to include a food systems approach as well as directing attention to undernourished people (Porter et al. 2014 <sup>[[#fn:r132|132]]</sup> ). However, it focused primarily on food production systems due to the prevalence of studies on that topic (Porter et al. 2017 <sup>[[#fn:r133|133]]</sup> ). It highlighted that a range of potential adaptation options exist across all food system activities, not just in food production, and that benefits from potential innovations in food processing, packaging, transport, storage, and trade were insufficiently researched at that time.

The IPCC WG III AR5 chapter on Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) (Smith et al. 2014 <sup>[[#fn:r134|134]]</sup> ) assessed mitigation potential considering not only the supply, but also the demand side of land uses, by consideration of changes in diets; it also included food loss and waste. AR5 focused on crop and livestock activities within the farm gate and land use and land-use change dynamics associated with agriculture. It did not take a full food system approach to emissions estimates that include processing, transport, storage, and retail.

The IPCC WG II AR5 Rural Areas chapter (Revi et al. 2014 <sup>[[#fn:r135|135]]</sup> ) found that farm households in developing countries are vulnerable to climate change due to socio-economic characteristics and non-climate stressors, as well as climate risks (Dasgupta et al. 2014 <sup>[[#fn:r136|136]]</sup> ). They also found that a wide range of on-farm and off-farm climate change adaptation measures are already being implemented and that the local social and cultural context played a prominent role in the success or failure of different adaptation strategies for food security, such as trade, irrigation or diversification. The IPCC WG II AR5 Urban Areas chapter found that food security for people living in cities was severely affected by climate change through reduced supplies, including urban-produced food, and impacts on infrastructure, as well as a lack of access to food. Poor urban dwellers are more vulnerable to rapid changes of food prices due to climate change.

Many climate change response options in IPCC WG II and WG III AR5 (IPCC 2014b <sup>[[#fn:r137|137]]</sup> ) address incremental adaptation or mitigation responses separately rather than being inclusive of more systemic or transformational changes in multiple food systems that are large-scale, in depth, and rapid, requiring social, technological, organisational and system responses (Rosenzweig and Solecki 2018 <sup>[[#fn:r138|138]]</sup> ; Mapfumo et al. 2017 <sup>[[#fn:r139|139]]</sup> ; Termeer et al. 2017 <sup>[[#fn:r140|140]]</sup> ). In many cases, transformational change will require integration of resilience and mitigation across all parts of the food system including production, supply chains, social aspects, and dietary choices. Further, these transformational changes in the food system need to encompass linkages to ameliorative responses to land degradation (Chapter 4), desertification (Chapter 3), and declines in quality and quantity of water resources throughout the food-energy-water nexus (Chapter 2 and Section 5.7).

The IPCC Special Report on global warming of 1.5°C found that climate-related risks to food security are projected to increase with global warming of 1.5°C and increase further with 2°C (IPCC 2018a <sup>[[#fn:r141|141]]</sup> ).

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==== 5.1.4.2 Food systems and the Paris Agreement ====

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To reach the temperature goal put forward in the Paris Agreement of limiting warming to well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C, representatives from 196 countries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement (UNFCCC 2015) in December 2015. The Agreement put forward a temperature target of limiting warming to well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. Under the Paris Agreement, Parties are expected to put forward their best efforts through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead. Article 2 of the Agreement makes clear the agreement is within ‘the context of sustainable development’ and states actions should be ‘in a manner that does not threaten food production’ to ensure food security.

Many countries have included food systems in their mitigation and adaptation plans as found in their NDCs for the Paris Agreement (Rosenzweig et al. 2018a <sup>[[#fn:r143|143]]</sup> ). Richards et al. (2015) analysed 160 Party submissions and found that 103 include agricultural mitigation; of the 113 Parties that include adaptation in their NDCs, almost all (102) include agriculture among their adaptation priorities. There is much attention to conventional agricultural practices that can be climate-smart and sustainable (e.g., crop and livestock management), but less to the enabling services that can facilitate uptake (e.g., climate information services, insurance, credit). Considerable finance is needed for agricultural adaptation and mitigation by the least developed countries – in the order of 3 billion USD annually for adaptation and 2 billion USD annually for mitigation, which may be an underestimate due to a small sample size (Richards et al. 2015 <sup>[[#fn:r144|144]]</sup> ). On the mitigation side, none of the largest agricultural emitters included sector-specific contributions from the agriculture sector in their NDCs, but most included agriculture in their economy-wide targets (Richards et al. 2018 <sup>[[#fn:r145|145]]</sup> ).

'''Carbon dioxide removal (CDR)''' . A key aspect regarding the implementation of measures to achieve the Paris Agreement goals involves measures related to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) through bioenergy (Sections 5.5 and 5.6). To reach the temperature target of limiting warming to well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C, large investments and abrupt changes in land use will be required to advance bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS), afforestation and reforestation (AR), and biochar technologies. Existing scenarios estimate the global area required for energy crops to help limit warming to 1.5°C in the range of 109–990 Mha, most commonly around 380–700 Mha.

Most scenarios assume very rapid deployment between 2030 and 2050, reaching rates of expansion in land use in 1.5°C scenarios exceeding 20 Mha yr <sup>-1</sup> , which are unprecedented for crops and forestry reported in the FAO database from 1961. Achieving the 1.5°C target would thus result in major competing demands for land between climate change mitigation and food production, with cascading impacts on food security.

This chapter assesses how the potential conflict for land could be alleviated by sustainable intensification to produce food with a lower land footprint (Cross-Chapter Box 6 in Section 5.6). To accomplish this, farmers would need to produce the same amount of food with lower land requirement, which depends on technology, skills, finance, and markets. Achieving this would also rely on demand-side changes including dietary choices that enable reduction of the land footprint for food production while still meeting dietary needs. Transitions required for such transformative changes in food systems are addressed in Section 5.7.

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==== 5.1.4.3 Charting the future of food security ====

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This chapter utilises the common framework of the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) (Popp et al. 2017 <sup>[[#fn:r146|146]]</sup> ; Riahi et al. 2017 <sup>[[#fn:r147|147]]</sup> and Doelman et al. 2018 <sup>[[#fn:r148|148]]</sup> ) to assess the impacts of future GHG emissions, mitigation measures, and adaptation on food security (Cross-Chapter Box 1 in Chapter 1, Sections 5.2 and 5.6).

New work utilising these scenario approaches has shown that the food system externalises costs onto human health and the environment (Springmann et al. 2018a <sup>[[#fn:r149|149]]</sup> ; Swinburn et al. 2019 <sup>[[#fn:r150|150]]</sup> ; Willett et al. 2019 <sup>[[#fn:r151|151]]</sup> ), leading to calls for transforming the food system to deliver better human and sustainability outcomes (Willett et al. 2019 <sup>[[#fn:r152|152]]</sup> ; IAP 2018 <sup>[[#fn:r153|153]]</sup> ; Development Initiatives 2018 <sup>[[#fn:r154|154]]</sup> ; Lozano et al. 2018 <sup>[[#fn:r155|155]]</sup> ). Such a transformation could be an important lever to address the complex interactions between climate change and food security. Through acting on mitigation and adaptation in regard to both food demand and food supply we assess the potential for improvements to both human health and the Sustainable Development Goals (Section 5.6).

This chapter builds on the food system and scenario approaches followed by AR5 and its focus on climate change and food security, but new work since AR5 has extended beyond production to how climate change interacts with the whole food system. The analysis of climate change and food insecurity has expanded beyond undernutrition to include the over-consumption of unhealthy mass-produced food high in sugar and fat, which also threatens health in different but highly damaging ways, as well as the role of dietary choices and consumption in GHG emissions. It focuses on land-based food systems, though highlighting in places the contributions of freshwater and marine production.

The chapter assesses new work on the observed and projected effects of CO <sub>2</sub> concentrations on the nutritional quality of crops (Section 5.2.4.2) emphasising the role of extreme climate events (Section 5.2.5.1), social aspects including gender and equity (Box 5.1, and Cross-Chapter Box 11 in Chapter 7), and dietary choices (Section 5.4.6, 5.5.2). Other topics with considerable new literature include impacts on smallholder farming systems (Section 5.2.2.6), food loss and waste (Section 5.5.2.5), and urban and peri-urban agriculture (Section 5.6.5). The chapter explores the potential competing demands for land that mitigation measures to achieve temperature targets may engender, with cascading impacts on food production, food security, and farming systems (Section 5.6), and the enabling conditions for achieving mitigation and adaptation in equitable and sustainable ways (Section 5.7). Section 5.8 presents challenges to future food security, including food price spikes, migration, and conflict.

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