Conclusions and recommendations

Capacity building

While COVID-19 has disrupted most aspects of life, including food systems and educational systems, it has also shown the potential for new shared programmes for capacity building as teaching has moved online. Addressing inequalities in Internet access will help to support these new online capacity-building opportunities.

There are various ways in which countries may build their capacity to cope with and adapt to climate change. The following examples serve to highlight some of the possibilities.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) – a global research partnership on food security – is forming a new “One CGIAR” beginning in 2022, with the aim of deploying scientific innovations for food, land and water systems quicker, at a larger scale and at reduced cost. It may be advisable to maintain pest management as a key component of the new One CGIAR strategy to strengthen adaptive capacity globally and especially in national programmes that are still building their capacity to address these problems. These can include “no-regrets” adaptation approaches, such as generally strengthening systems and their ability to respond to new challenges from climate change (Heltberg, Siegel and Jorgensen, 2009). The idea behind these types of approaches is that many system improvements will be valuable whether or not specific current climate-change scenarios play out. Because new pest introductions are often at least as impactful as climate-change effects, it is straightforward to design no-regrets improvements to pest-management systems. There may be limits to no-regrets options (Dilling et al., 2015), but there is much room to improve pest- and disease-management systems on farms and in regional management. An IPPC phytosanitary capacity evaluation can be used to evaluate a country’s readiness to respond to plant-disease challenges (Day, Quinlan and Ogutu, 2006; IPPC Secretariat, 2012). This is another example of a potential no-regrets approach, since enhancing capacity will have benefits whether or not climate-change scenarios play out as expected, and will probably also result in cost–benefit improvements.

Building capacity to adapt to change also means finding ways of managing financial risk. This can sometimes be achieved, at least in part, through crop insurance, which is an attractive option for protecting farmers’ livelihoods under climate-change stresses. However, it does not necessarily protect productivity and may provide an incentive for production of particular crops to continue in regions where the crops are no longer suited to the new environment (Falco et al., 2014).

Elements of effective altruism (“providing benefits for society”) – whereby some share of effort would be invested in evaluating worst-case scenarios for pest effects and how they may be addressed – may also prove useful in helping countries adapt to climate change (Garrett et al., 2020b).

To conclude, the evidence reviewed in this report strongly indicates that in many cases climate change will result in increasing problems related to plant health in managed (e.g. agriculture, horticulture, forestry), semi-managed (e.g. national parks) and presumably also unmanaged ecosystems. Adjustments in plant-protection strategies are already necessary today because of recent climate changes and adjustments will be even more crucial in the future, assuming the projected climate-change scenarios come true. Climate-smart pest management, which involves the implementation across farms and landscapes of holistic approaches, is mostly based on selected existing management methods, in order to be able to enhance mitigation and strengthen resilience. Maintaining managed and unmanaged ecosystem services and produce, including food, under climate-change conditions is of paramount importance, and preventive and curative plant-protection measures are key components to the maintenance of current and future food security.