Bonn, Tuesday, 14 November 2017 – FAO joins the high level roundtables on Climate Action for Zero Hunger to highlight the connections between hunger, poverty and climate change, and discuss how to improve action and investment in agriculture and rural areas to tackle climate change and achieve Zero Hunger by 2030.

The international community has committed to eradicate hunger and extreme poverty by 2030, but climate change constitutes a fundamental threat to achieving these goals. Through its impacts on agriculture, rural livelihoods and infrastructure, climate change is among the causes of rising hunger, which affected 815 million people in 2016, up from 777 million in 2015.

Poor and hungry people are the most affected by natural disasters and weather variability. Climate change lowers their access to arable land, water, fish stocks and forests, hindering agricultural productivity, income opportunities and economic growth.  It also damages their assets including housing, savings, crops and infrastructure.

If no action is taken, the current effects of climate change on agricultural production and livelihoods will intensify, undermining efforts to achieve sustainable development. A further 100 million could become extreme poor by 2030 due to rising food prices and productivity shocks caused by climate-related disasters.

Addressing climate change today will determine how well future generations prosper and are fed. The High-Level Roundtables on Climate Action for Zero Hunger offered a forum in which actors from all sectors – public and private, state and non-state, international, national and sub-national – come together to discuss integrated actions to fight climate change, hunger and poverty.

Panellists identified the main challenges faced by countries, especially SIDS, in the fight against climate change and examined specific threats posed by extreme weather events to achieving food security and nutrition and eradicating poverty. The event also provided concrete examples of how SDG 1 (No poverty), SDG 2 (Zero hunger), and SDG 13 (Climate action) can be addressed simultaneously through integrated interventions and investment that combine, inclusive pro-poor sustainable growth, green jobs creation and social protection for the rural poor.

See the video report from the event on Vimeo 

Read more about the High-Level Roundtables on Climate Action for Zero Hunger 

More information about FAO's work on climate change