Laurie Goering

As impacts from prolonged droughts to extreme heat worsen, climate change is threatening the world's ability to produce enough nutritious food and ensure everyone has access to it.

At COP28 in Dubai, more than 130 country leaders on Friday called for global and national food systems to be rethought to address climate change - the first such official recognition at a U.N. climate summit of growing worries about food security and planet-heating emissions from agriculture.

From Afghanistan to Somalia, countries affected by conflict are often highly vulnerable to climate change impacts as well.

Wars and insecurity, and absent or problematic governments, can make getting help to the people who are most at risk from extreme weather, crop failure or other climate-change-related threats hugely challenging. 

Heatwaves have been breaking records around the world, with China enduring its highest-ever temperature, heat advisories being issued across vast swathes of the United States, and fierce heatwaves in southern Europe endangering lives.

Sweltering heat in Europe this summer has presented severe threats to people's health in Italy, Spain and Greece, where wildfires on the islands of Rhodes and Corfu have led to thousands of residents and tourists being evacuated.

When the London borough of Wandsworth introduced "low traffic neighbourhoods" a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, blocking off some streets and adding cycle lanes in an effort to spur more healthy walking and cycling, the changes backfired.

Queues of fume-spewing traffic built up on major roads and with alternative routes blocked, emergency vehicles struggled to get through. Frustrated drivers hefted road-blocking flower planters out of their way and protest petitions took off.

In nations from Somalia to Pakistan, the world's poorest and most fragile communities are facing the harshest impacts of climate change - a reality that is driving worsening poverty, potential for conflict and resentment against major polluters.

But finding innovative ways to get finance directly to those communities, to build resilience that is based on local knowledge and desires, could save cash and lives, and protect a global humanitarian system increasingly overwhelmed by surging need.

As global hunger swiftly rises - by more than a third last year - curbing it will require not growing more food but rethinking broader systems of trade and aid, farming's heavy reliance on fossil fuels, food waste and meat eating, experts said.

Farmers today grow sufficient crops to feed twice the current population - but nearly a third of food produced globally is spoiled or thrown away, said Philip Lymbery, the chief executive of Compassion in World Farming International.

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In the Indigenous community where Rukka Sombolinggi grew up, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, strict rules governed how a slaughtered buffalo's meat was divided.

The elderly, the sick and other vulnerable people received choice pieces - the head, the liver and the small intestine, considered a particular delicacy once roasted.

Pledges to slash climate-changing emissions to nearly zero now cover more than 90% of the world's economy. But emissions themselves are still rising, despite scientists warning they must plunge by nearly half this decade to keep people safe.

Dealing with climate change through voluntary commitments, especially by businesses, "has simply not worked", noted Arianne Griffith, a lawyer and corporate accountability expert with advocacy group Global Witness. 

Alongside the Brazilian Amazon's vast soy and cattle ranching economy - a major driver of deforestation - sits an older, more sustainable system of families and cooperatives producing forest products including the palm fruit açaí, rubber and pharmaceutical ingredients.

That "bioeconomy", with its legions of small producers, including Indigenous communities, receives just a fraction of the flood of investment pouring into expanding soy and cattle.