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With climate change impacts already felt in the world’s drylands, there is an urgent need for action, at various scales and initiated by different stakeholders, to ensure the sustainability of food production and livelihoods in these regions in the coming decades. There is also the need to rapidly establish baselines, assess and start monitoring progress on sustainability, emerging as result of the action taken.To aid in this effort, this paper provides a short list of expected transformations (under each of the three sustainability pillars) for guiding the planning and implementation of policy, governance and practice-level actions. Gender and indigenous people’s [...]

Progress towards Zero Hunger must be protected from the dual challenges of pandemics and climate change. The frequency of infectious disease outbreaks – including the emergence of novel viruses and zoonotic diseases – is expected to continue rising as livestock, food security, economies, and global health are increasingly threatened by a destabilizing climate. At the same time, malnutrition is unacceptably high across all regions of the world. In 2019, nearly one in ten people in the world were exposed to severe levels of food insecurity.The 13th Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA) in 2021 is seeking recommendations, guided by [...]

The 2020 report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the Asia and Pacific region, provides an update on progress towards the 2030 targets (SDGs and WHA) at the regional and country level. Selected indicators look at undernourishment, food insecurity, childhood stunting, wasting and overweight, adult overweight, child minimum acceptable diet, exclusive and continued breastfeeding, and anaemia in women and children. While the region continues to work towards ending all forms of malnutrition and achieving Zero Hunger, progress on food security and nutrition has slowed, and the Asia and Pacific region is not on track to achieving 2030 targets. [...]

The Government of Palestine officially endorses a new national food and nutrition security policy and a corresponding National Investment Plan. Read the whole article here.

The urgent need for a positive impact on the livelihoods of livestock keepers is elaborated in this Regional Strategy for Animal Health and Production for FAO Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia (REU). This strategy aims to present the main aspects of REU’s work on livestock and includes three pillars – animal health, animal production, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – along with seven cross-cutting issues, among them gender, environmental sustainability, community farming as a business, and coordination with other international organizations. The strategy follows FAO’s commitment to the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through continuous and dedicated work [...]

This regional publication provides an overview of the development of organic agriculture in eighteen (18) countries in the following ECA sub-regions: Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan); Eastern Europe (Belarus, Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation and Ukraine); South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia); and South Eastern Europe (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey).The report includes an in-depth analysis of how these countries have achieved the current state of organic agriculture regarding legislative and policy frameworks, governance systems, production, key actors, marketing, opportunities and challenges, and future strategies. The presence of transparent and reliable [...]

This report presents insights and emerging lessons on food systems governance from the experience of nine cities that have developed urban food interventions – Baltimore, Belo Horizonte, Lima, Medellín, Nairobi, Quito, Seoul, Shanghai and Toronto – and draws on diverse sources of secondary information regarding the experiences of other cities throughout the world. It highlights entry points for the governance of urban food systems issues; common procedural and content-related considerations when addressing those issues; predominant governance models; and operational opportunities for future investment. Successful examples can encourage other local governments to adapt new approaches and innovate within their own context. Every [...]

This paper presents a sector-specific framework for better understanding the role of the AFOLU sector in the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) at the country and aggregate level. It is designed to facilitate the stocktaking and analysis of national climate change mitigation and adaptation priorities, barriers to implementation and support needs specific to the AFOLU sector in order to inform country programming and guide the flow of external support. It can also be used at the country-level to facilitate NDC enhancement and encourage compliance with the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) of the Paris Agreement. As such, it is directed at national [...]

This curriculum consists of 17 sessions, covering themes from community forestry establishment to policy and regulatory support. The main objectives of this curriculum are to:- understand the role of forests in climate change mitigation; - have a better understanding on community forestry and community forestry instructions; - realize the importance of stakeholders’ participation and their roles in the establishment of community forestry Also available in Burmese.

Chile has a native forest that constitutes 18 percent of its continental surface area and over 60 million hectares of protected areas. The country is considered a global hotspot of conservation priority due to its endemism and a high degree of habitat loss. The loss of ecosystems could increase if economic development does not progressively adopt sustainability standards that create less of an impact on biodiversity. From August 2015 to May 2020, FAO implemented the project in order "to develop and implement an integrated monitoring and assessment system on carbon stocks and biodiversity in forest ecosystems (SIMEF) supporting the National [...]