Cow burps, food waste to take spotlight at COP28 agriculture day
Climate advocacy groups are pressuring world governments gathered at this year's United Nation's COP28 climate conference in Dubai to commit to cutting global food sector emissions, as the conference host promises to put agriculture in the spotlight.
Global food systems- including farming and land use, livestock production, household food consumption and waste, and energy used in the farm and food retail sectors — account for 31% of human-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
But few governments have ever published numeric targets for lowering those emissions, focusing instead mostly on the use of fossil fuels for power, transport and industry, according to climate advocates.
«Business as usual food systems would use nearly the whole carbon budget for a 2-degree Celsius world. We need to implement food systems approaches throughout COP28,» said Joao Campari, global leader of food practice at the World Wildlife Fund.
A full day of the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP), Dec.
10, will be dedicated to food and agriculture — a first for any COP — and the United Arab Emirates host has said the event will be a «game-changer for food systems.»
Advocacy groups say countries should take the opportunity to commit to stronger action on food system emissions in their national climate plans, called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
Many NDCs mention agriculture, but just 53 of 164 countries who had submitted NDCs to the U.N. as of September 2022 included quantified GHG goals for agricultural sub-sectors, according to CGIAR, a global food security research group.
The United States, India, China and Canada are among the countries that did not
