Extreme weather, conflict, and trade disruptions are fueling hunger and displacement. Read the full document to explore integrated solutions that match the scale of these challenges.
2025 Shapes Tomorrow: Time to Build Climate-Resilient Food Systems
The climate crisis threatens global food security – but solutions exist. In 2025, key international forums will spotlight how inclusive, climate-resilient food systems can offer lasting solutions. WHH will be on the ground to share experiences and make the case for action.
The climate crisis is intensifying food insecurity and hunger across the globe. Extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and storms are undermining agricultural productivity, pushing vulnerable communities closer to hunger and displacement. For example, climate-related shocks have already contributed to rising food prices and declining crop yields in many regions, creating a growing humanitarian emergency.
Solutions Are Within Reach — but They Must Be Holistic and Inclusive
Effectively tackling the climate crisis requires moving beyond reactive humanitarian responses towards anticipatory, risk-informed climate adaptation. The agricultural sector, as a cornerstone of livelihoods for millions, must be transformed through sustainable and climate-resilient practices that strengthen food security and reduce vulnerability to climate shocks.
Equally crucial is the urgent need to significantly scale up climate finance, ensuring that funding directly supports vulnerable populations – such as smallholder farmers, women, and marginalized groups – enabling them to build adaptive capacities tailored to their specific risks and contexts. It is crucial that climate funds are not only accessible, but ethically distributed – supporting local leadership and avoiding top-down imposition.
Achieving these goals demands a coherent and integrated approach that bridges development cooperation and humanitarian action. By enhancing local capacities and fostering inclusive governance, we can reduce vulnerability and build lasting resilience against the accelerating impacts of climate change.
Welthungerhilfe (WHH): Turning Commitment into Action
WHH is actively implementing these approaches by supporting climate-resilient agriculture projects, promoting sustainable water management, and advocating for inclusive climate finance. One example is the SUSTFARM+ project in collaboration with the Kenyatta National Farmers’ Cooperative and with ADS Western in Kenya, which empowers smallholder farmers through improved access to climate-smart farming techniques, capacity building, and cooperative marketing. This project strengthens farmers’ resilience to climate variability while enhancing their food security and livelihoods. Together with local communities we build adaptive capacities that meet their unique needs and strive for systemic change through political advocacy.
Key Climate Moments in 2025: Opportunities to Set the Course Right
2025 offers critical platforms for advancing climate adaptation and transformation where WHH will be present and vocal:
- COP30 Climate Conference, Belém, 10–21 November 2025
- 2nd Africa Climate Summit, Addis Ababa, 8–10 September 2025
- Climate Conference Bonn, 16–26 June 2025
At these events, we will highlight the urgent need to scale up climate adaptation, especially for the most vulnerable.
COP30 Climate Conference in Belém, 10–21 November 2025
The 2025 UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) will convene in Belém, Brazil, from 10 to 21 November 2025. As the first COP held in the Amazon region, it aims to spotlight forest preservation, climate justice, and the acceleration of global climate finance commitments.
2nd Africa Climate Summit in Addis Ababa, 8–10 September 2025
The Second Africa Climate Summit (ACS2) provides a critical opportunity to advance Africa’s shared vision for climate action, economic transformation, and food security.
The Nairobi Declaration, adopted at the first Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi in 2023, underlined Africa’s determination to speak with one voice on climate policy, calling for scaled-up financing, investment in renewable energy, and recognition of Africa’s unique role as both a continent highly vulnerable to climate impacts and a key actor in global climate solutions. It emphasized the urgency of transitioning to resilient, low-carbon economies that create jobs and opportunities for Africa’s youth while safeguarding ecosystems and livelihoods.
Against this backdrop, ACS2 in Addis must now turn ambition into implementation - particularly adaptation and the transformation of food systems.
Our demands:
1. Locally-Led Adaptation
- Empower local leadership, strengthen food systems, and ensure the right to food anchors adaptation.
- Integrate indigenous knowledge with science for sustainable solutions.
- Mainstream conflict-sensitivity in adaptation, particularly in migration-prone areas.
- Ask to governments: channel resources to local institutions, involve CSOs in National Adaptation and Mitigation Plans (NAPs, NDCs etc.), ensure transparency.
- Ask to donors: provide multi-year, grant-based finance, include local actors in decision-making, support cross-border initiatives.
2. Climate Finance – Quality & Quantity
- Current finance is inadequate, inaccessible, and mitigation skewed.
- Africa needs more equitable, transparent, and grant-based funding reaching vulnerable communities.
- Leverage finance to transform food systems, end hunger, and drive green development.
- Ask to governments: track and allocate finance transparently, incentivize private sector for equitable food systems.
- Ask to donors: scale up adaptation finance (50%+), ensure flexibility and accessibility, reform global finance systems.
3. Climate Action in Fragile & Conflict-Affected Settings
- Climate action in fragile areas is essential to prevent instability and exclusion.
- Use the Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus for integrated approaches.
- Ask to governments: adopt integrated adaptation–peace–gender–land policies; strengthen governance and early warning.
- Ask to donors: prioritize finance for fragile contexts, fund peace–climate synergies, support cross-border initiatives.
4. Cross-Cutting Principles
- Climate justice & human rights must guide action.
- Women and youth as leaders in adaptation.
- Food systems transformation as a pillar of resilience.
- Strong AU and regional solidarity to amplify African voices.
WHH in Addis Ababa
Together with World Vision and Helvetas we are presenting a diverse program in pavilion C1 from Sep 8 to Sep 10 under the headline: “Climate Justice in Action: Financing Africa’s Climate Solutions From the Ground Up” See the General Pavilion Agenda for program details.
On Sep 8, 2:00–3:00pm, Naomi Berhanu, Head of Program of WHH Ethiopia will contribute as panelist in the side-event “Nature Positive Food Systems” (Location: M4).
Climate Conference Bonn, 16–26 June 2025
At World Conference Center Bonn (WCCB), Germany.
These are the 62nd sessions of the Subsidiary Bodies of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This key event prepares the ground for decisions to be taken at COP30 in Belém, Brazil in November and will be instrumental in shaping the global climate adaptation agenda.
We co-organize a side event with FAO and CIRAD (French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development) on 19 June 15:00-16:15 that will gather experts to discuss how locally-led sustainable agrifood system transformation provides actionable solutions for improving quality and quantity of climate finance for the agrifood sector.
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