Photo © GIZ / Sven Schuppener
Integrating nutrition into climate change actions and climate change considerations into nutrition interventions opens opportunities to achieve several development goals and produces multiple co-benefits. Enabling wide access to healthy and nutritious food that is regionally produced, benefits rural producers and urban consumers, reduces greenhouse gas emissions along the value chains and makes the entire food system more resilient to climate change. Set in the right framework, it is a development intervention that has both adaptation and mitigation benefits. This new GIZ policy brief presents the development challenges posed by climate change and malnutrition, links them together and delivers key messages regarding climate change and nutrition outcomes. Recommendations are made on how to promote these interlinkages for development cooperation across various sectors.
Key messages:
- Policy makers should aim to highlight the potential for nutrition interventions in climate change using a landscape approach, along with other win-win interventions on the rural-urban spectrum such as climate-smart agriculture production (soil carbon), clean energy and resilient cities.
- The NDC Partnership can be used as a platform to support the UNFCCC Parties in elaborating their agriculture climate sector commitments and channel guidelines on linking nutrition and climate action.
- More systematically undertaken climate risk and vulnerability assessments could help better align nutrition projects with a long term planning framework based on climate risk management. Projects could estimate positive/negative adaptation and mitigation outcomes of nutrition interventions, comparing traditional nutrition projects with ones that include climate risk and vulnerability assessments as well as mitigation considerations.
- Training materials on food and nutrition security for national partners do exist and could be used in future projects targeted at the land use sector.
- Over-nutrition is becoming a topic of concern in international projects, but is not taken up yet in project planning, design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of results. All forms of malnutrition, including their implications for climate change adaptation and mitigation outcomes, should be taken into account in future project design.
Access the Policy Brief here.
