Policy, climate finance, and collaboration spotlights at the CGIAR Climate Action Program launch

NAIROBI, Kenya (10 April 2025) — Building on over two decades of experience in global climate research, CGIAR launched a Climate Action Program that focuses on strengthening the climate resilience of over 600 million smallholder farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Globally, a third of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission comes from agriculture, forestry, and land use industries. Smallholder farmers who provide 1/3 of the world’s food supply are also the ones who are greatly affected by the impacts of climate change. Despite this, climate finance can only reach up to 2% of the vulnerable smallholder farmers. Thus, in a world where climate targets are missed, about 1.8 billion people will suffer from hunger.

The program offers two key pathways to addressing the challenges brought by climate change by focusing on driving policy and investments to climate finance to allow scaling innovations to millions of smallholder farmers and implementation of locally led actions. “We are working with other programs and with national partners because we need to mobilize resources to deliver these greater returns. We cannot do it alone… we are doing the science that then supports AICCRA (Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa) and other programs that do the acceleration and scaling.”, Joint Interim Co-Director of CGIAR Climate Action Dr. Sieglinde Snapp elaborated on the program’s vision.

IRRI Senior Scientist and Climate Change Focal Point Dr. Ole Sander discussed how the program will contribute towards the 2030 Methane Target which has two main initiatives, the Global Methane Pledge and the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The Global Methane Pledge is a commitment of over 160 countries to drastically reduce methane emissions and decarbonization of economies before 2030. NDCs on the other hand are climate action plans…