Briefing

DIGEST: COP30 with Emma Williams, Chatham House

3 November 2025

COP30 kicks off next week in Belém, on the edge of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest – could food and farming systems play a bigger role finally? Scroll down for an interview with Emma Williams, of Chatham House, on the topic.

Brazil is certainly a good setting for it: Internationally it’s one of the world’s biggest agricultural exporters, while domestically its 3.9m family farms supply 70% of the food Brazilians eat. It’s also home to the majority of the Amazon rainforest, which is critical to climate mitigation and climate systems, but is threatened predominantly by agricultural expansion.

This year, Brazil also achieved something monumental – under President Lula’s pledge to eradicate hunger, it managed to lift 40 million people out of food insecurity in just two years! Backed by unprecedented cross-government coordination with 30+ policies, it introduced cash transfers for the most vulnerable, universal school meals supplied by local family farms, community kitchens and public restaurants, expansion of urban food markets, and farmer support to transition to agro-ecology. So it can be done, and rapidly, with concerted government action…who knew 🤔

Running with this theme, food at COP30 will be supplied by Brazil’s family farms, following a call from civil society at COP28 that COPs should exemplify a sustainable future better.

And if all of that wasn’t enough, this year Dr. Mariangela Hungria became the first Brazilian to win the World Food Prize for her research on soil microbes and nitrogen fixation.

👏🏻 You go Brazil 🇧🇷

COP30 – the year for food and farming transformation?

I sat down with Emma Williams, Associate Fellow with the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House, to ponder this question.

JF: This year’s COP includes food and farming on its ‘Action Agenda’ – what’s the significance of this?

EW: The Action Agenda is not part of the formal UNFCCC negotiations, but it’s an increasingly important part of the overall COP package, and Brazil is bringing its own flavour to it.

What the COP30 Presidency is trying to do – and credit to them – is get their arms around what’s happening in the messy world of governments, civil society and private sector and ask; who’s doing what, and how can we [work together]?

The Brazilian Presidency has named ‘food systems and agriculture’ as one of its six key Action Agenda pillars. Under this pillar, there are three main objectives; land restoration and sustainable agriculture; resilient, adaptive and sustainable food systems; and equitable access to adequate food and nutrition for all.

Because Brazil is home to the Amazon, and a big agricultural producer, there’s an expectation that Brazil will engage with food and farming issues more than e.g. Azerbaijan as host of COP29 last year.

JF: Does this mean we can say food and farming are firmly on the COP agenda finally?

EW: Food and farming are on the Action Agenda, but there’s a lot of other stuff on the agenda as well. Across the six Action Agenda pillars there are 30 objectives featuring lots of cross-cutting issues, including finance, nature, forests and health, which touch on food and farming.

So there’s a lot going on and it’s a bit messy, and we’ll have to wait for the Leaders’ Summit, a few days before the main conference, to see what President Lula decides to prioritise.

But the expectation is that there will be something big on Brazil’s new Tropical Forest Forever facility. The other thing we know, from Brazil’s G20 presidency last year, is that the country is really focused on hunger and poverty, so this also is about equity and social justice. It would be great to see Brazil go one step further, and look at the overall food system as well as deforestation at that Leaders’ level.

JF: What’s the plan for turning the Action Agenda into, well, action?

EW: To try and generate rapid action on the Action Agenda objectives, the COP president is encouraging the proposal of ‘acceleration plans’. The ACF (see below) is co-architect of one of those acceleration plans, along with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN).

Since there are now quite a lot of governments thinking ambitiously about food systems, there is an emerging ecosystem of really useful tools – from mapping financial flows and domestic spending on food, to modelling different scenarios and trade.

And as we know, food systems are complex. In an ideal world all governments would know about all the tools and be accessing them, but we don’t live in that world. So we’ve got a plan to accelerate better connections between governments and tools.

JF: What about formal COP30 negotiations – has there been much progress on food systems since COP last year?

EW: There’s a certain amount of progress, but one of the issues is that the UNFCCC is still not as focused on food systems and their transformation as it could or should be. This year was the UN Food System Summit Stocktake in Addis Ababa, looking at progress since the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. But that’s not the UNFCCC process, which has fairly limited grappling hooks still in terms of food systems in the negotiations.

JF: What are the big things to look out for in formal negotiations this year?

EW: Money, and mitigation commitments from countries via their NDCs (National Determined Contributions). Both of those are really important for food systems, but they’re not food system specific.

There’s a question about how good the NDCs are on food systems. NDCs vary wildly – some countries have a very short document, while others are much more comprehensive. We are starting to see some with a standalone section on food. Cambodia’s NDC, for example, is strong on food systems and they’ve really thought about how to integrate things like nutrition.

And then there’s the money. One of the key items on the agenda in Belém is the $1.3 trillion ‘roadmap’ that’s due to build on the core $300bn agreed in COP29 last year, to replace the $100 billion per year in existing climate finance commitments. Then there’s the fact that too little climate finance goes into agri food systems – how can that be addressed?

JF: Why have food systems taken so long to be on the agenda, and are we getting there?

EW: I think people don’t understand the term ‘food systems’ outside the converted. If you talk about food security, or food production, that makes sense, but what do we mean by system? However, I think the UN has done a pretty good job over the last four or five years of getting governments to see it makes sense to see it as a system, what that might mean in practice, and how it might benefit them.

And now we’re getting to the stage, a bit like climate change 20 years ago, where more governments are putting in place the decision-making architecture so they can at least identify and start to grapple with the trade offs involved in a genuinely systemic approach to food and everything it touches – health, biodiversity, equity, climate etc.. Because these trade-offs are often really hard, and this is the problem, they’re so political. So I think the broader push via the UN Food System Summit has helped.

In terms of the COP, the more food is seen as a cross-cutting, systemic issue, and one that plays into all sorts of different things on climate mitigation and resilience, the better. Because if you [silo it] like making it just about forests, or land degradation, you risk losing [consideration of] that vital trade-off aspect.

JF: You head up an alliance of countries championing food system transformation – tell us about that.

EW: I’m head of the secretariat for the Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation (ACF). It’s a coalition of highly ambitious countries looking to transform their food systems. We launched at COP28 with five countries – Brazil, Cambodia, Norway, Rwanda, Sierra Leone.

That COP was a high tide mark: The Emirates Declaration, which now has around 160 signatories, was the first time countries came together to recognise food systems as a really important part of [action on] climate change. But ACF countries go further, committing to act across 10 action areas covering the whole gamut of everything you’d expect on food systems, including GHGs, access to affordable nutritious food, food loss and waste, research and innovation.

Crucially, ACF countries also commit to consider trade offs for policy coherence. They’ve committed to integrating these into their NDCs and other national plans, and to report annually on what they’re doing. The aim of ACF is to be small, fast moving, visibly credible, and talk about experiences with other countries and show them what’s possible. Because it’s not like the energy transition, right? Everybody’s feeling their way with food systems.

The UNFCCC COP is a good platform for the Alliance, and Brazil is one of our founding members and co-chairs (alongside Norway and Sierra Leone). We’ll be announcing new members in Belém.

JF: We’re moving out of the era of multilateralism, just when we need it more than ever. At the same time, smaller authorities, like at the city level, are achieving transformation where national governments are not. What do you make of this tension?

EW: This is a really good question. We’re 10 years on from the Paris Agreement, and increasingly the global architecture on climate change is set. This means implementation is happening at the country level, but there are certain things that can only be delivered at a multilateral level. Not everything can or should be agreed at a COP, but COP can shape ambition, set direction, and hand on to the next COP.

Something like the ACF, a coalition with ambition, can create a sense of solidarity and visibility on the international stage for others to learn from. That kind of use of the multilateral arena is helpful – the rules are agreed multilaterally with everybody, but groupings of ambitious countries spur on action and act as good examples.

JF: What can those working on food system transformation learn from the green energy transition?

EW: I don’t pretend to be an expert on energy, but in terms of the similarities, it’s all about the cost drivers. Brazil has a good example: The Ministry of Agrarian Development and Family Farming have a big program called the Productive Forests Program, which looks at making trees worth more standing. So you look at the economics of it.

If solar and wind are going to be cheaper over the longer term, then you’ve got to look at the upfront installation costs. But as costs tumble, the economic logic becomes inexorable over decades, and similarly with the food system you need to look at where the economic incentives are pointing. One of the difficulties for governments and farmers is that there are currently really difficult trade offs. Sometimes you could do the expensive and right thing, or you could take the cheap, lowest path of resistance.

The big difference is [that food is personal, energy is not]. My mum turns on the lights and doesn’t really care where the electricity comes from, she just cares that the light goes on. She does care about what she cooks. She loves cooking and she cares about what she eats and what she makes for her family, and that’s a decision that she’s making three times a day, and it’s the same for all of us. Food is personal and political in a way that energy is not, and so governments have to spend a lot of political capital on food system decisions.

What would be a good outcome for food and farming at COP30?

EW: NDCs will be decided before COP30, so Belém won’t change how food systems are integrated there. But it would be really good if everyone left Belém with the message that food systems are fundamental to climate mitigation and resilience.

The other aspect is money and investment. If countries can go away and put together proper actionable and investable plans, that are politically supported and not just a high level vision but specific to sectors and geographies, and have these ready for the next COP, then that would be huge.

Sierra Leone, for example, which is an ACF co-chair, is an illustration of how to do the work domestically, and then come to the international stage as a good prospect for investment.

It has a very ambitious national plan, the President’s really behind it, and they’ve raised over a billion dollars in pledges – a seriously impressive amount for a small country. They are asking; ‘right, where do we need roads, where do we need rice processing infrastructure, how is our ambition to improve rice production going to trade off against forestry loss, where can we be looking at sustainable intensification?’.

JF: What do we have to be optimistic about in food system change?

EW: That it’s starting to happen. This is one of the things I love about working with the ACF – there are some great people in each of these governments, often quite unsung, and they are quietly getting on and doing their day job, and starting to shift big and complicated systems. That’s exciting.

I think in five years time, we’ll be saying that the first half of the 2020s was about understanding the idea of food systems and starting to put it on the map multilaterally, and then the second half was coming of age and saying, ‘right, this is no longer worthy of comment. Of course food systems need to be included – they drive nearly a third of our GHGs, we have to sort this out, it’s absolutely fundamental for the poorest people.’

So that coming of age is on the horizon. It was in the ‘too hard’ bucket for a really long time, and it’s being fished out. We just need to make sure that the multilateral process makes space for that.

Key COP30 links

Author: Jez Fredenburgh

Knowledge Exchange Fellow

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